I went to put in my Visa info on a site, as shown in the picture. Note that the MasterCard radio button is selected by default… though I didn’t see that at the time. I know my name, of course, and even the card’s expiration date, but I [...]]]> First, the dumbness. Second, lessons from this dumbnosity.

I went to put in my Visa info on a site, as shown in the picture. Note that the MasterCard radio button is selected by default… though I didn’t see that at the time. I know my name, of course, and even the card’s expiration date, but I had to dig the card out of my wallet to put in the number. I did all that, filled in a few other items, and clicked OK.

The site told me my credit card didn’t match the type selected… and made me reenter my credit card number.

Dumb, inexcusably dumb on three-and-a-half counts.

1) You can algorithmically determine which card it is from the number itself; there is no reason whatsoever to ask someone to tell you want kind of card it is. (What, you think this will help cut down fraud? You don’t think fraudsters know the card algorithms better than any normal person?) Go here for an explanation of how it works. So stop asking for information you already have!

2) If you insist for some reason on a human being selecting one of these radio buttons, don’t start with one selected! Yes, that violates the normal rules for radio buttons… so see dumbnosity #1. Or don’t do it with radio buttons; make each clickable and put a big green border around the one selected, or something.

3) When it give me the error message, it erased my card number. So I had to dig back into my wallet, pull out the card…. You can use very simple on-page JavaScript to determine that the card and number don’t match, so don’t refresh the page because of this error. But this error shouldn’t exist to begin with (dumbnosity #1 again).

3.5) Why not make PayPal an option? I don’t want to keep giving all these websites my credit card info. Each time I do this, there’s an opportunity for a costly mistake, one more place a security breach can happen. With PayPal (or Google Checkout, I suppose), security is much more locked down. Sure, PayPal could have a breach also, but if I have 20 places that have my card number and can screw up vs. a single entity in that situation, the latter is a lot safer. (And it’s not like I’m increasing the risk of PayPal exposure, since I already have a PayPal account, as I suspect most regular Internet shoppers do. If PayPal exposes my data, the harm is the same whether I use them once or have 20 merchants that they serve.)

I do recognize that PayPal sometimes charges merchants slightly higher fees than the credit card companies, and that it’s a pseudo-bank that isn’t regulated like a bank. I’m not saying that merchants should absolutely offer a PayPal option, just that it’s well worth considering. It has pluses and minuses that I won’t go into here. As a consumer, I personally would like that option in addition to using a credit card. Indeed, I have backed away from buying at a few sites because they didn’t offer PayPal and I didn’t really want to give them my credit card… and I live part time on a small island in the Pacific Northwest with no retail stores other than food markets, a small auto- and boat-parts shop, and a lumberyard/hardware store, which means I need to either buy stuff on line or spend most of a day and $30+ to get on a ferry and then drive 20 miles to a shopping center. So I need to shop on line!

Lessons From Dumbness

1) Think first. If you’re asking for information from a user and the user believes you already have this information, the user will be angry and will trust you less. This principle holds whether you’re asking for data on the web, gathering IT requirements, interviewing (whether interviewee or interviewer), and so on.

2) Push back on dumbnosity asked of you. The developer who put together this page a) should have foreseen at least dumbnosities #2 and #3, and it’s not inconceivable he or she should have spotted #1. C’mon, even if you didn’t know about #1, didn’t you at least suspect that this was the case? Surely you’ve encountered sites that don’t ask you what kind of card you have! The developer should have questioned this requirement in the name of customer friendliness. Developers who don’t think beyond the strict confines of “I do exactly what the specs say” aren’t adding sufficient value in these difficult times, putting both their own jobs and their employers at risk. If you don’t push back when you spot little mistakes, you’ll have neither the practice nor the credibility to push back on the big ones. This isn’t just a problem for developers, either.

3) If you’re managing, remember to specify the problem, not the solution. Here the surface problem was “capture the dude’s credit card info,” not “step 1, put up three card logos and make the user choose.” But the larger problem was “find a secure way that the user can pay for stuff.” Stated that way, the PayPal strategy becomes an option in the solution space.

TTFN From My Island

Okay, it’s not my personal island, though often it’s quiet enough to pretend. But as I write this, the sun is out, I’m watching two sailboats make their way across the water in front of my deck, in the last hour I’ve seen a young (no white head or tail yet) bald eagle soar by less than 100 feet away, and I know I’ll get yet another spectacular sunset over the water this evening. And there’s no traffic, no traffic lights, no cell phone coverage or TV to clutter up the day, decent Internet bandwidth, and most of all a slight slowing of time, room for an “ahhhh” between some of the tick-tick-ticks. And now a raven’s calling. (They don’t say “Nevermore,” but rather sound like a crow with a cold.)

I only miss the city sometimes.

Have a great weekend.

It says Mailing Address in big red letters. Then it says Mailing Address in bold black letters. The cursor goes automatically to the first edit box.

So what do I — and I suspect most other folks — start typing? My mailing address, [...]]]> I was filling out an online form today when I came to this section:

It says Mailing Address in big red letters. Then it says Mailing Address in bold black letters. The cursor goes automatically to the first edit box.

So what do I — and I suspect most other folks — start typing? My mailing address, of course.

Designers, it may technically be part of your “mailing address” database table, but we humans on the other end of the screen don’t automatically think, “you want my name here” when we come to an area boldly and colorfully (and redundantly) labeled “mailing address.”

(By the way, this form was the gateway to a site whose core product is known to anyone who travels even occasionally; it’s not a one-off, one-person operation.)

PMBOK Breaks Project Management

The PMBOK is the grandiosely titled Project Management Book of Knowledge from the Project Management Institute (of which I’m a member).

Wow, I thought, someone else thinks formulaic, by-the-book-only project management can be as much a problem as a [...]]]> I found the following subject line on a mail in my inbox yesterday:

PMBOK Breaks Project Management

The PMBOK is the grandiosely titled Project Management Book of Knowledge from the Project Management Institute (of which I’m a member).

Wow, I thought, someone else thinks formulaic, by-the-book-only project management can be as much a problem as a solution. The mail was from an electronic newsletter called IT Business Edge. It struck me as odd that an IT publication would be railing against the PMBOK.

Of course, what happened is that my inbox shows only the first 30 characters or so of a subject line. The entire subject is “PMBOK Breaks Project Management into Five Lifecycle Phases.” (It links to this slideshow — and it’s not a slow Flash thingy, so kudos to IT Business Edge for that!)

I’m not sure why this is headline-worthy news; did someone in IT just discover project management?

But now that I think about it… five phases? They’ve got it down as Initiate, Plan, Executing, Controlling, and Closing. Aside from the grammatical issue — it’s either “…Plan, Execute…” or “Planning, Executing…” — there must be at least one and perhaps three additional, explicitly called out phases in an IT project.

The unforgivable omission is Rollout. Without a specific Rollout cycle, there is a tendency — I’ve seen it over and over again — to “dump” the new solution on the users, point them to a (functionally useless) training website, and disperse the team after Closing — but long before the solution is embedded in user processes. Sure, you can technically put Rollout in one of the other phases, but it’s really a post-Execution activity, involving a handoff from the execution team to an operations team… and much more.

There also need to be User “Readiness” and Shakeout phases. These can be subsumed into other phases — e.g., part of Rollout. However, because the activities and players are significantly different, I prefer to call out explicitly at least Shakeout. In addition, if you’re using stage-gates (go/no-go decision points), these phases represent transition points where the sponsors and stakeholders need to get together on a go/no-go decision. (What, you think you can’t say “stop” after the project is rolled out to users? Wrong. If it isn’t working for them, you may well need to perform a rollback, and you’d better have all the stakeholder ducks in a row when that happens!)

As for the names of these last two stages — there aren’t universally accepted terms. I don’t like “Readiness” — it means everything and nothing — but it can serve as a catch-all for user documentation and training, adoption planning, helpdesk/support preparation, and so on. Shakeout represents the first few weeks to a month of actual use on live data, where numerous bugs and configuration errors will crop up, and where the original development/project team should remain in place to address them. One reason I prefer to see this particular phase visible at the highest level is that there is great pressure at this point to move the team on to other projects… especially if the project is late… and since we’re talking about software, the likelihood that it will be late is, oh, 100%. If the executive sponsor and the CIO are aware that there is a full project phase that is just getting started, there is less pressure to move the team, and more weapons with which to fight the pressure.

So maybe leaving off these phases from an IT project justifies the headline after all, with a slight emendation:

Misapplied PMBOK Breaks Project Management

I’m impressed.

It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.

Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. [...]]]> One of my business lines is tied to Google Voice. Today I got a voice message that was automatically transcribed by Google.

I’m impressed.

It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.

Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. When will you be home? Is Joe coming to the meeting? Please call me back. Hi, this is Joe Blow, and I’m running for Congress.

There are two huge advantages to transcriptions.

1. You can read them on your computer or SmartPhone — and people generally read a lot faster than they listen.
2. Reading is silent; there is little more annoying than people in a conference room or shared office trying to listen to voicemail.

Transcription isn’t perfect. However, when there is low clarity, you can go back to the voice version… which isn’t always all that clear either.

We’ve come a long way since Garry Trudeau singlehandedly killed off the Apple Newton!

It started with this one.

There were more in the series, but this is considered the classic.

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has [...]]]> I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features?

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has worked really well. (I’m proud to say that the deck for my presentation in NYC Wednesday contains only a single slide with bullet points, a list of takeaways on the final slide.) Still, they’ve added a number of things that make it a “must” upgrade for me.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are also a few items that enhance it for relatively inexperienced users who just want to make their presentations a bit better.

So here are ten high-value items new to PowerPoint 2010:

1. Embedded video. Now, when you put video into your presentation and then move it to another machine, the video moves with it.
2. Fine-grained control over complex animations. Most PPT animations are not worth the bits they’re printed on, but if used well they can really clarify a point. Now you can make motion-type animations, such as moving an object along a path, a lot smoother. This is pretty nitpicky stuff… unless you really sweat over your presentations, which I do. I hate stuff that breaks the illusion and calls attention to the presentation itself, and this new feature lets me avoid some “corners” that I never felt comfortable with.
3. Save presentation as video. Use your presentation to create an actual playback video. You can even add narrations and timings.
4. Create sections of files, akin to headings in a Word doc. Now in a long PPT, you can find the individual parts easily. This feature is especially useful when people collaborate on a presentation. Given that PPT is often used in business for creating reports, businesses will find it a lot easier to pull these together from multiple people. (Is PPT the best way to present this info? That’s a different question. Nevertheless, like bullet points, this is a common usage, and PPT 2010 has improved the experience.)
5. Include video from YouTube or other online sites. Now you can include YACV (yet another cats video) in your presentation… or even some useful content. You do need a live Internet link to run the video — which makes sense in terms of copyright.
6. Place titles and other objects on top of video. Video used to run on top of everything else. Now you can add titles, pointers and arrows, and other objects in the standard bring-forward/send-backward manner. (You can also put the video in a non-rectangular frame.)
7. Video controls — brightness, contrast, recoloring — akin to what you can do with pictures.
8. Remove background from a picture. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough for most people on many pictures. For years, I’ve been doing this by the very complex method of drawing a closed Bezier curve around the object (that’s the tool that looks like a square with some rounded chunks taken out, called “freeform”); clicking Edit Points to adjust the curves to fit the object better; copy (Ctrl+C) the picture; right click the outline you drew and select Format Shape; select Picture Fill and Fill from Clipboard; trim as needed with the Offset controls. I still have to do that on complex pictures, but I’ve found I can nail about half of them using the new Remove Background feature, a huge timesaver. (Wednesday’s presentation has about 25 pictures from which I’ve cut out the background, from a watch replacing the head on a $500 bill — hourly billing! — to a stamp that says “Done” to a plate with a pretzel. You’ve got to come to the seminar if you want to know how a plate with a pretzel illustrates the concept of managing scope.)
9. Better cropping tool, which “ghosts” the cropped part of the image as you work, so you can see what you’re cutting out as well as what you’re leaving in.
10. Trim and fade video and audio. No longer do you need a separate editor to cut the end off a video, or fade it in or out.

There are 50 or more new features that add value.

As always, few people other than professional designers will use every feature. However, each user works with a different feature set; that’s why there are so many features in these kinds of programs. The trick is to (a) find the features that make sense for what you’re doing and (b) when you think, “I wish I could do that,” it’s ever more likely that you can do that.

======================

I took part in some ask-the-customer design sessions for Office 2007. Two things struck me that many critics don’t think about, because they don’t play well with the whole bash-Microsoft shtick. (There are lots of legitimate things to get on Microsoft’s case about, but there are many things the company does very well.)

The context is that we had about 15-20 law-firm CIOs and tech leaders in a room; they were asked about what they wanted to see in the next version, then called “Office 12.”

First, there were innumerable conversations like this:

Customer #1: I wish Word would do X in the next version.

Customer #2: It already does it. (Note — it was almost always another customer replying before someone on the Office team could say anything!)

These kinds of conversations sparked the Ribbon. What good are all these powerful features if people don’t know they’re available?

Second, it became clear from those conversations pretty much every feature in Office had fans that considered it essential, detractors who thought it was bloat or unneeded, and others who didn’t know it existed. (Note: Clippy was long gone from Office by this time.) All of those features do have their uses, because people do radically different things with the products. I know people who build reports in PPT, do complex slides, use it as a note-taking tool, even put together videos. All use different features.

If you [...]]]> When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on.

If you think spam has been increasing… well, you’re right. This report in Baseline Magazine notes that 97.5% — 97.5%!! — of email in December and January was spam. [Note: Unfortunately, it's another one of those annoying built-in-Flash-because-the-developer-thinks-it's-cool slide shows.]

The latest trick is manipulating the sent time so that if you keep stuff in your inbox sorted by date, the spam winds up spread throughout the folder; you can’t just pick off the newest stuff on top.

Almost 10% of the spam came from the US. As a US citizen, I find that both embarrassing and infuriating; how is it we can’t catch the folks within our own borders?

====================

The worst part is that about eight years ago Microsoft proposed what still looks like an elegant way to kill spam: make the spammers “pay” for their emails. [The link is to a generally readable page; it then has links to highly technical research papers with more detail.] Microsoft didn’t originate the idea, which has been around since at least 1992, but they actively promoted it for a time.

There was considerable discussion about the idea in the early part of the decade — but there was a lot of “oh, it’s Microsoft, so I don’t like it” and “this isn’t absolutely perfect, so let’s not do it.” That’s the stuff that kills projects, and we’re paying for it today.

Or as Monty Python notes, on the menu “there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam; that’s not got much spam in it.” Well, now we’re up to spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, egg, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,  spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam. (Yes, that’s the proportion.) As far as I’m concerned, that’s got too much spam in it.

In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.”

Joel, you’ll be missed.

I can think of no one in the tech [...]]]> Joel on Software — by ex-Microsoft veteran and Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky — has been my favorite tech-world blog by far for the past decade.

In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.”

Joel, you’ll be missed.

I can think of no one in the tech world with more common sense than Joel, and perhaps only Scott Berkun was his equal.

If you’re a techie, read Joel’s prescient comments on how Microsoft lost a key developer market — written six years ago. (If you know who Don Box is, don’t read the last few paragraphs while drinking milk.) If you’re not a techie, read the section titled The Two Forces at Microsoft, about a third of the way down the page. Even if you don’t understand a few specific references in there, it’ll give you an enormous insight into why Windows has captured market share over the years, one that few folks outside of Microsoft recognize. (It’s also one that increasingly few folks inside Microsoft recognize, unfortunately, though I think Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows for the past three years who shipped a high-quality Windows 7 in a timely manner, does get it.)

I completely understand Joel’s reasons for abandoning blogging. It’s a significant endeavor, if you try to do it well. (I may not be in Joel’s league, but I do try try to write well, and it takes a fair amount of time even for someone who is a fluid, fluent author.)

I understand it, but I’ll still miss his insights on the world of technology, and on the larger world in which technology lives.

Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me [...]]]> Software vendors are invariably after you to upgrade. Should you? If so, when?

Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me why I should update, other than their excitement as conveyed by that exclamation point: “We worked for weeks or days or hours on this version! Ya gotta do it! Now!”  Except…

1. It’s a minor upgrade to fix a small bug that doesn’t affect me.
2. The upgrade to the version before my current one had a serious bug that they failed to catch that led to the hijacking, corruption, and loss of the first year of NoCCrit, including about 250 posts and innumerable comments.

This message staring me in the face for a week, coupled with my beta testing of Office 2010 and discussions with a couple of client folks, got me thinking about when to upgrade. There are, I think, three different upgrade approaches vendors use:

The Big-Release Upgrade

Most server and desktop systems from large vendors follow the Big-Release methodology. Every two to four years, these vendors issue a major new release. Microsoft, for example, released Windows 7 last year, and they’re planning to release Office 2010 in a few months (June, according to word on the Web).

Should you upgrade?

Pros:

• These upgrades are generally safe and competently tested, despite the so-called words of wisdom suggesting you wait until the first service pack.
• They have new features that are likely to be useful, though you may not “get” them until you’ve worked with them. After all, what can Microsoft add to Word at this point that (a) isn’t already in there and (b) you might actually need? Surprisingly, there’s still a lot of room for growth, from little touches — moving the highly valuable Document Map to where users might actually find it and renaming it Navigation Pane — to new ideas such as the online/web version that competes directly with one of Google Doc’s strengths.

Cons:

• It costs money. (It’s a different calculus if you’re on an enterprise-wide license.)
• It takes time and effort, people think. It does take a bit of time while your machine grinds away, but you can do it during lunch. As for effort, Microsoft rolls out new versions to 50,000 people a night internally with virtually no glitches or hassles. If your corporate IT department can’t figure this out, suggest they talk to their Microsoft rep and ask how Microsoft does it. I assure you, there’s no magic, just an IT group that’s got this part of their act together.
• It will break some existing apps built atop the current version. If that’s the case — and I know it often is — then your IT team isn’t learning from experience. Stop doing this! Build on published APIs, not hacks. And then test with the beta versions. Even Microsoft occasionally gets this wrong internally, but it’s usually because a developer tried to do something extra-special and pushed into unsupported territory. That said, occasionally big companies change the underlying model in an unanticipated way, such as the file-formats change in Office 2007.
• You believe you know better than the users what they need. ‘Tain’t so.

The Annual Upgrade

Some companies do annual upgrades as an ongoing revenue stream. I use some music-creation software that used to dun me for annual upgrades, at about $300-400 a year in total. It’s an economic model users hate… but it’s a model that keeps the companies in business, instead of selling maintenance contracts or the like.

Software — mostly — isn’t free. If you have a solution you like that is free, great; go for it. WordPress, for me, is such a solution. On the other hand, I couldn’t have written my book Legal Project Management in anything other than Word (I tried Open Office and Google Docs to see if they’d work).

But often you pay in ease of use, or lack of testing, or intrusive (or hidden) advertising, or no support. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch — TANSTAAFL, as Robert Heinlein put it. It’s a trade-off, one you should make carefully. Sometimes free is the answer; sometimes it isn’t.

If you don’t take an annual upgrade, you’ll likely pay considerably more for your next upgrade, almost as if you were purchasing new again. Sometimes you can find opportunities to join the “welcome back to previous customers” program and minimize those costs; keep your eye out for them.

The Quick-Turnaround Upgrade

The WordPress 2.9.2 upgrade falls into this category; so do many SaaS/hosted solutions, where they push upgrades out whether you want them or not. Many are insufficiently tested. If you can, resist them for at least a few weeks to see what problems other guinea pigs are turning up; check the support boards, Google for answers (can you Bing for them?), and exercise caution.

The other end of this scale is the semi-automatic upgrades pushed out by Microsoft, Adobe, and other large companies for your desktop software. In an ideal world, I’d put many of these off too, but we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world with sufficient bad guys who like taking on high-profile targets not just because it’s somehow cool to beat Microsoft’s engineers but because they are actively trying to rip you off if they can get past your computer security. Thus I think there’s little choice but to take upgrades in a timely fashion for popular software such as Windows, QuickTime, and Flash; it’s a matter of security.

These companies have reputations to protect and so they test the heck out of these rapid upgrades. That doesn’t mean they’re foolproof, but it does lower the risk so that taking the upgrade is safer, all told, than not taking it.

Finally, there are the antivirus companies that suck innumerable cycles from your machine with their daily upgrades. Again, the bad guys are truly out there, and so I think you have to accept these daily updates. My main cavil is that not all of these vendors properly throttle down the amount of bandwidth they use to push the updates, so that it can interfere with your use of the computer.

Other

Like any classification scheme, this one isn’t perfect. Where, for example, would you put the every-other-year major service packs for Windows releases? Still, it’s a good framework to think about how and when you want to upgrade, rather than leaving it to chance.

I’ve never actually seen the book, mind you. But I know it’s there. Why else would so many software designers follow the same rules so slavishly?

This rule is sometimes called NIH, “not invented here.” [...]]]> It must be written, in the Great Book of Software Design Principles:

• Thou shalt never leverage the usability/design principles discovered by thy rivals.

I’ve never actually seen the book, mind you. But I know it’s there. Why else would so many software designers follow the same rules so slavishly?

This rule is sometimes called NIH, “not invented here.” Developers — recall that I’m an emeritus member of that community — believe in two variants of this commandment:

• If thou in thy mind shall see a unique design that seemeth “better,” thou must then go forth and implement it, no matter what thy users and customers desireth.
• If thou shalt pass by a design of thy rival and not notice thy rival’s principles, then thou mayest not only ignore those principle but thou mayest claim that those principles, like grapes, are truly sour and an abomination.

Sometimes it works out for you. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Let me offer some examples:

1. The Book of Jobs sayeth, Apple did bring forth a mouse with a single button. Microsoft saw that it was good, but then saw that yea, a mouse that hath two buttons was better. I start with this one because it’s a great introduction to the debate, with good value on both sides. Apple chose to make the core action — clicking — simpler while making the secondary action — right clicking, which requires both hands on the Mac — more difficult. Microsoft chose to make more power available to users in exchange for a slight increase in complexity of learning. My personal vote is for the Microsoft method, but both are valid and have sane points in their favor. (Caveat: I was one of the first Mac developers in 1983 — the beta of the Mac — and 1984 and developed a general dislike for Apple for its treatment of developers during that period, so I am likely not objective here.)
   
2. The Scroll of Beraysheet sayeth, Microsoft didst discover that, traversing word to word, paragraph endings and punctuation were as equal to the starts of thy words; Mozilla claimeth thus that a word is but a word and that the cursor shalt pause upon solely the start of new true words. When you advance the cursor by word in MS-Word or the Internet Explorer/Windows edit tool (Ctrl+left or right arrow) and come to the end of a paragraph, the cursor treats it as a stopping point. Likewise, when you come to punctuation, the cursor stops. This is seriously elegant, because it recognizes that these are common editing points. When I move word-right from the last word in this paragraph as I edit this post in Mozilla Firefox, the cursor will not stop on the period, or the break between paragraphs. There is a technical word for this behavior. That word is “stupid.” (“Beraysheet” is the sound of the first word of the Bible in the original Hebrew, rendered in English as “In the beginning.”)
   
3. The Tale of Goog and MicGoog revealeth that Goog didst find value in a clean and simple search page, while MSFT didst clutter it unto infinity. And yea, Goog smote MSFT in the search wars. Picture the MSN start page, if you dare. ‘Nuff said.
4. The Book of Numbers and Letters sayeth that in spreadsheets shalt thou count the rows with numbers and the columns with letters; I am Kapor. Microsoft failed to obey this commandment in MultiPlan, the predecessor to Excel, using numbers for both, yielding the abomination R2C2 (row 2, column 2) for what any real spreadsheet would call cell B2. R2C2 wasn’t nearly as cute as R2D2, and eventually Microsoft got with the program and relabeled things Lotus-123-style. (Mitch Kapor used to run Lotus, makers of 123. Sorry, getting a bit obscure here halfway through my second glass of wine as I write this at night — though I assure you it’s sacramental wine. And the threat of a lawsuit might have had something to do with Microsoft’s choice; I was at Microsoft seemingly unto forever, but this battle truly was before my time.)
   
5. The Dread IE Scrolls claimeth that the righteous mayest move from browser tab to tab by commanding Ctrl+Tab, and that yea and verily thou shalt be able to alternate between two tabs by pressing Ctrl+Tab again. Mozilla and Chrome sayeth, Not so much. Actually, Mozilla Firefox sayeth, Heck No! Chrome sayeth, Ctrl+Tab shalt rotate through the tabs — a noble analog to the Windows Alt+Tab paradigm, except that they got the paradigm wrong! In Windows, if you hold Alt and press Tab a few times, you indeed cycle through your windows. However, if you press Alt+Tab, release it, and then Alt+Tab again, you alternate between your two most recent windows, an outstandingly useful model. IE implements the same thing with Ctrl+Tab. Chrome is out to lunch… and Firefox didn’t even realize the lunch bell had rung. Helllloooo! I’m sure someone thinks there is a rationale for this behavior, but like the Mozilla word-to-word issue, it’s dumb, to be blunt. Microsoft got this one right; copy it!

I could go on, but I hope you get the idea by now… and I’m running out of Biblical puns. (I almost cited #4 as stemming from the book of Corinthians, but figured that was way too obscure. A “Corinthian” is also a type of column. You know, like spreadsheets have columns. I think I’ll stop now. Jokes shouldn’t have to be explained.)

The first rule of software design is that if someone has a good user-interface idea, borrow it. A couple of 1980s court cases said it’s basically okay to do that (IANAL, of course), so get used to the idea that different isn’t better. Get over it. And get it right. Your users are counting on you… or cursing you.