I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Enjoying a long weekend in the provinces. We have a place we head away to for most breaks and so have got to know the locals over the past few years.
They’ve worked out I do something with computers so I’ve reluctantly become the local computer fix it guy.
It’s eye opening dealing with real people who try to use computers to help them do their work. We’ve found this a lot with Xero as well.
A couple of good examples today.
Firstly a local service operator who sends out invoices every month. He had an old computer which was running Microsoft Works 2000 (wks files). His invoices data is in wks spreadsheets and he spends 1.5 days each month doing invoices by hand.
He’d brought a new laptop ($1400) and had some service people move his data across.
His old computer hard disk (8GB) had just died and so he was on his new laptop with brand new office 2007, not connected to the web (and only gets 40k dial up) and needed to send out invoices. Help!
So I popped down.
First problem was Office 2007 cannot open wks files. His Internet connection was not set up and we didn’t know the dial in number to connect so I couldn’t surf to find how to open wks files.
As much as it hurt I resisted the temptation to just sign him up to Xero (I’ll get him next time and the thought of 40kb dial up was too awful) as he just needed to pump out some invoices. The solution unfolded like this …
- Heading back home to find their ISP support page and locate the dial in numbers
- Determined that there was no Office 2007/WKS converter obviously available
- Headed back and located the original Works 2000 disks and installed it. That seems to be the only way to convert wks to Excel. Thank goodness he had saved the install disks for 8 years and it was a CD not floppies.
- Set up his internet connection and email
- Converted his wks files to Excel 2000 files
- Uninstalled Works
- Created an invoice template in Word
- Cleaned up his monthly excel files so that they could be accessed from Word
- Did a Word Merge to pump out his monthly invoices.
It took about an hour I suppose, but I’d hate to think what he would have done if I wasn’t there. Invoicing can now be done in a few minutes saving him 12 hours every month.
And even though it all now just works from Excel and Word to instruct a person how to do a Word Merge is just too hard. Especially as the monthly billing file needs to be changed each month.
Just trying to explain the 30 steps I almost burst out laughing how ridiculous it was to expect anyone to follow these steps.
Thank goodness someone showed me where the File dialog is in Office 2007. I would never have found that on my own.
When the MergeDoc opens there is a lovely message that says something like “ok to select * from ‘$table1′”. Eeek!
I could go and write an Office solution for him but that would be a day or two of consulting.
It was a reality check as to how hard computing is for non industry people. What do they do without a local geek?
What appalled me even further was how much crap was on a brand new laptop. There were probably 30 desktop icons in XP. When I uninstalled Works (because I installed temporarily so I thought I should take it off to reduce confusion) there was such stuff as Office Business Contact Manager which has a version of SQL Server installed. Yikes!
There was probably 3 antivirus programs and whole families of no-name brand photo suites.
A brand new laptop had XP and IE6! You just know that eventually he’ll have to pull down some huge files and IE7 over 40kb. I don’t even want to know how long that would take.
In the second example (word got out that computer fixit stuff was happening a few houses down) a person had brought a Sony MP3 player which only accepts songs from some program called SonicWorks or something and she had a raw Vista error code 0000099 yada displayed. Nice.
After some googling I found it was a security rights on the Sony program music store and found a fix sequence.
There was no way a normal user would have any idea at all how to solve that problem. Again, a fairly new laptop just loaded with all sorts of crap and icons no one would every need.
I was ashamed to be from our industry. It’s 2008 and this is the experience that we give users.
It made me more excited though about what we are doing with Xero. Really trying to think for normal people and make something complex easy - unlocking the power of computing.
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… and people wondered why, when I got a new laptop for work, the first thing I’d do is reinstall the OS from MSDN disks. I saw on /. that sony was charging $150 for an app to get RID of all the crap they put on. Disgraceful, and another reason why I only recommend Macs now.
I’m still trying to work out how to move my mother from her P-166 windows 95 box to a mac. It’s only got email, but still….. PITA.
Have you guys considered GoogleGears to offline some of Xero?
Heh. I was a host for an OASIS conference in a rural location in Martinborough some years back. They had a decent connection and a LAN. Nothing was configured properly and we lost a lot of time trying to get online. Then it kept crashing and their local IT wiz tried to patch it up. I later figured out that his set up was just plain stupid and he managed to screw up a laptop for one of the attendees (with bad consequences), but it didn’t stop him chasing me with a $600 invoice for his services.
The lessons I learned:
1. you can’t get IT support in the province
2. some people still run DOS apps
3. there is really no money in IT there
4. some times you do need to “download the Internet” because the line may go down at any moment
If anyone knows of an IT job somewhere in the back country, please, ping me. I’ll sell the biz and bugger off there on whatever peanuts they pay. :-)
Good on you Rod for helping out. Two observations, one geek related, one not
1) The mutual help is what makes rural communities. All too often in areas with large numbers of absentee owners, those owners don’t immerse themselves in the community in the times they are there. It’s an important part of being in a rural community to “do your bit”. In your case (and in mine) that means being Mr computer fix it guy on klunky old machines for people who don’t particularly want to use them
2) Stuff just needs to work. I’m sure you’ve thought about it but you really want to send your interaction people at Xero into the provinces to talk with, and more importantly observe, how business people work. They’d learn some stuff when away from the high speed, well resourced, fast internet connected city based businesses. Like you said once - it’s about the data not the software - your man just wanted to send out some invoices - he doesn’t care about software (and especially not SaaS) doesn’t get involved in the FTTH/FTTP/Cabinetisation argument and doesn’t want to learn to become a sysadmin - he just wants to send out his invoices - pure and simple
A relative recently decided to upgrade from a 400 MHz AMD K6 running Windows 98 to a new MacBook and I helped with the migration. All the Word and Excel stuff was no problem at all, but Outlook didn’t seem to have any way to export the email to something standard.
A good way seems to be to temporarily install Mozilla Thunderbird. It knows how to read Outlook’s files, and itself stores things in a standard format that Apple’s Mail.app can import.
Wel, the guy bought some cheap stuff right? He just got what he bought IMO. If you buy a B&W tv at the store, you don’t complain it doesn’t show SkyDigital in full colour.
It’s hard for this guy because he bought the cheap ****.
Berend, its not a question of cheap or not. Its a problem that software is really general, and there although its often quite powerful and can do the things that Rod describes, it has no idea what you are trying to achieve.
It does not “just work”. Theres no big button that says “I have Excel and Word, and I want to produce mail-merged invoices every month” (although I guess there could be).
Computers are slowly moving from the “cover all bases” to the specific. I can use Basecamp and Xero and other web-type services to do relatively specific things, and sooner or later there will be a transparent interface between all those services that I will be able to plug them in, have them talk to each other, and have them sort my life out.
And the thing is, its really not that hard. We have masses (masses!) of computation power sitting on our laptops (eg: keyring.co.nz is one of the most processor intensive websites around, and its running on my Mac mini!). We need to be diverting some of that computer power to making things easy.
Its starting slowly…
Ah the local computer fix it guy. Boy do I know what thats like.
The last PC I purchased I got from DSE preinstalled with Linux. I had a copy of Vista which I installed from scratch. This was such a better experience than trying to remove all the crap from my girlfriends overpriced Vaio when she got it a few months ago. Another thing here is that her $3000 Core 2 Duo machine only shipped with Vista Home Basic (It is Premium capable, and then some). Now I don’t know about Sony, but my OEM pricing has Home Premium at just a dollar more than Home Basic. I just don’t understand why you would ship a reasonably high spec machine that is easily capable of running premium with basic. And there is no anytime upgrade in NZ/AU either! Ahhhh
The reason why manufacturers charge you to remove the crap is the companies providing the crap are paying them to preinstall it on their machines, and they have to pay that back if they remove it from the machine.
You are not alone in being amamzed at how much crap comes on a computer these days. It is all to make a bigger margin by taking sponsorship from those crapware authors. If they get another $20-$50 from those sponsors it helps with their margin a lot.
It would also surprise you (maybe not) how many “computer” issues are due to these apps. A lot stuff bogs the machine down with memory hogging apps etc… and people blame Windows or the laptop for the issues. I guess the helpdesk call costs have not outweighed the extra money they make … yet.
My wifes laptop (HP) was not too bad … but was noticably better after a clean re-install.
Rod,
It’s nice to hear your story about giving back and getting in touch with your local community.
I need a new laptop and mobile phone but I’m frozen because I can’t make a decision on what to buy because I have no clue about all the stuff on offer. Surely there is a market for a more simply designed approach for people who want basic programs.
It can be helpful to have the latest version of Ubuntu on a USB key. OpenOffice probably opens the files you require and it comes with the minimum of cruft. *If* you chose to install it (rather than just use it for rescue purposes) you can add applications as you see fit.
We had a board meeting last week. One board member uses Windows. After some gentle ribbing he said “look, at it just *works*, ok.”. Two minutes later he had a complete system failure. Fortunately the files he was just about to present from were still ok and recoverable using the above Ubuntu method.
I’ve worked as field engineer for a nationwide vendor and witnessed these sorts of setups all the time. Now, several years later, I’m launching my own consultancy company designed purely for (very) small businesses. I only sell HP notebooks and desktops because of their support and because they aren’t full of crapware. Despite that, when setting up a new computer for a customer, I’ll uninstall anything they don’t need and also setup additional apps like Firefox. I’ll also go through the commonly used programs and change the default settings, to more sensible settings that will benefit the customer. I don’t know of any other small shops that do this for customers, and I think there’s a large market of customers like Raf above who are looking for a simple solution that doesn’t confuse customers. I don’t want to be accused of spamming Rod’s blog, but if you want to contact me, my details are on my blog (click my name for the link.) I’m only in Wellington at the moment but can help anyone out nationwide.