In the past, employers and workers shared a social bond, i.e. people felt loyalty to their companies and worked their entire lives for a single employer. Today, work (in technology particularly) has become a capitalist commodity to be bought (by the employer) and sold (by the worker). This reality forces change.

There is a tradeoff between social and market norms. It\’s compensation. More empowerment is frequently balanced with less compensation. So, again it becomes each person\’s individual preference.

And GO MAC already, unless you think your not cool enough.

The average person(Person A) knows about 300 people on a first name basis. Lets suppose Person B, who is among Person A\’s 300, has 150 exclusive contacts that are not in Person A\’s 300 nodes. And every person in the chain similarly has 150 exclusive contacts. So by the time you get to person F you have 150^6=11390625000000. And the world has only 6.5 billion people! It\’s a small world after all. Real small.

- Have you tried new days software/sites like CD rippers or ‘Build a wiki sites’…you are guided to do..and thats what every body love in this world. A system ‘assume’ the user to be ‘intelligent’for the system, it should just support him/her to do his task – be it copying a CD, playing a song (apple), withdrawing money from ATM, or closing the ERP Books.An IT system is just a matter of time, tomorrow some new system and replaces todays.This is its destiniy – it should never humiliate the users for the purpose of its existence.

Oracle makes a lot of money from making complex system doesnot means that its justified. Politicians also spent a lot of money in building roads and bridges, which, with time, keep on costing more and more making the politicians/cotractors richer and richer.

Yes, ERP really benefits as they help in tracking, monitoring, contrlling, reporting, accessing, securing and playing with the data. But what I think is that its not the WEB that is going to help to improve them,its the owner companies which have to innovate themselves. Eg. Yahoo and MSN mails was worlds best
till the time Gmail came. All were free, but simple concepts of gmails and its user friendly approach was well accepted by the audience – like the related mail feature, or search feature, or chat with your buddy in the mail – this must have given a bang on the head of yahoo/MSN teams and so they too copied.tomorrow somebody will innovate more and improve the user experince. Idea is simple – let the user be free to do more thinking elsewhere – make system as simple as possible.

First of all I will like thanks for giving time to reply on my thoughts.

- VC++/VB, I coded for about 4 years, and all my teams and collegues agreed in those years that the best help they ever got was always on MSDN,after pressing F1. In those days, Internet forums/sites provided few more example , just to allow us to negotiate on time or memory eaten up by various codes.

- now I trains ERP system to end users. Sadly to say but somedays I feel its really a painful \’change\’ for the end users. Those guys end up doing 100s of actions on a \’highly integrated\’ systems (aka ERPs) which provide great output indeed, but at the cost of the pain felt at the users. eg. Oracle FA system – try to compare the number of steps you do depreciate 500 asstes in an ERP with PO,AP,Project,GL , FA systems in place with an excel-type system doing it in 1 or 2 formula. eg2. – compare the WinXP with the Unix V where you have to run an MP3 file copied on your pen drive – I bet you will love to do it 100 times again on XP.

- Is there any module in Oracle/SAP/Siebel that says \

Thanks for the interesting comment. I agree with you on that user friendly software is very important.

Talking about Excel/Word, you may end up simple concepts of Excel using the F1 technique. What about writing Macros? You will definitely search for help or use a book. Can you learn Visual Basic or Visual C++ using F1? Maybe. Why does a company make one product userfriendly and another non userfriendly? The key difference is that one product is simple other is complicated.

One of the key components of user friendlyness is simplicity. Make a software user friendly by keeping it enormously simple. Some companies have been very successful in doing this. For instance, Apple does not sell a product, it sells you an experience. User Friendlyness is no doubt a key component of Self Support 2.0. But, you can make a complex software userfriendly only to a certain extent. What beyond that? User friendlyness is also relative.

Oracle’s not only spends a lot of money on Support, but also make most of their revenue by providing support.

As of today, its not possible to build Self Support 2.0 into software through user friendlyness. But, when someone manages to do that, that would no doubt be the next big thing. Who knows.

Thanks for this fantastic example. This perfectly compliments the central idea of my post. Your blog on Support 2.0 is very thought provoking and you will find me commenting there regularly.

By the way, I will try to do something to increase the comment length to save people trouble of splitting the posts.

The reality is that the help we used to find via Google in five minutes now took the vendor a day to turn around and get us an answer. And the help that used to take a few hours or overnight via Usenet newsgroups now took the vendor a week before they found someone of sufficient technical capability to be able to answer our question.

Our formerly passionate and dedicated team grew dissatisfied and unproductive. Instead of moving at web speed, we were forced to sit and wait days to be able to move forward. It was the single most unproductive change that could have been made: and the difference was all in the support model: open support versus closed support. Support 2.0 versus Support 1.0.

I have more stories like this and more information about Support 2.0 on my blog at <a href=\