@futurebird I literally taught a coworker how to do mail merge last week. She told her manager and my manager that I was her hero that day! The kudos felt good, but I marveled that nobody else in the office knew how to do it, or even that it existed.
She was going to write the email and send it to 250 people at a time, to get it to a few thousand recipients. And when one address is incorrect, manually find the wrong address and re send the email.
I think I saved her a good half days' worth of tedium.

@Jirikiha @futurebird

the lack of knowledge... the gap between what people use of various tech, and what the tech actually could do for them alone is a perfect reason to stop making new tech.

invest the time and money into onboarding people.

SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY WASTED

warm regards, someone who gave up on working as a UX engineer because of above sitch.

@futurebird I blame the ridiculous learning curve and hollowing out of features imposed on us by Microsoft. What say you?

@aeveltstra

I can't blame microsoft when google docs is just as bad.

You need to use their "apps script" to do a mail merge OR install one of the add-ons made by third parties which means giving up a LOT of privacy to ... someone.

I wrote some app script to avoid exposing my students grades and names to ... just anyone.

To me mail merge is an obvious core feature of "office software" So why is it still so obscure and hard to do? Where is the "progress?"

@futurebird @aeveltstra I agree that this ought to be considered a core feature, but that unfortunately is the myth of progress at work.

Realistically speaking if a use case is sufficiently obscure that someone would expect to need to do an internet search to figure out how to do it/remind themselves how they did it last time, then that use case will never be considered core to the product by the product managers, and it will be lost in one or another rearchitecture. (In this case it was not lost, but explicitly moved to a plugin, away from the "core" feature set of Google Docs.)

But the social dynamic at play feels like a physical force in the development of software, once you know it well enough to recognize it.

@plantfeest @Jirikiha @futurebird selling new tech without their customers' understanding of what th is tech does is where the profits are, so I'm pretty sure that Silicon Valley are going to be taking a hard pass on this advice

@sovietfish @aeveltstra

Totally agree. Software tries to get new users with flashy features, but then keeps them by making them scared of change.

How many little companies pay thousands and thousands for microsoft just because of some feature like mail merge that hasn't gotten any better in decades?

How many do the same with google?

What I really love is how documentation just doesn't exist anymore. The "help" menu in programs is mostly useless. "Go search reddit and stack overflow"

@Sean @Jirikiha @futurebird

Maybe Silicon Valley is not the intended recipient, but the people buying, or rather NOT buying shit, ahem, new tech.

Get refurbished instead, repair/upgrade/learn about what you got, save yourself a shitload of money

@plantfeest @Sean @Jirikiha @futurebird can't do much with refurbished when it has no "brains." Everyone's fighting over the scraps.

@cmthiede @plantfeest @Sean @Jirikiha

Yeah I added this one to the fediTV playlist. Do you know about it?

@futurebird @plantfeest @Sean @Jirikiha I do not, enlighten me and those that don't know, thanks.