It’s Simply About Being Organized

My mother’s just thrown her Microsoft Office for Dummies in the trash can!

To be honest she’s never really used it, because she’s only ever used the most basic features of Outlook Express and Word.  And now she’s found the new world, she’ll never use those again.

Over the weekend I set her up with Chrome, Google Mail and Docs for email, and word processing, Picasa to manager her pictures, Posterous so she can blog and Facebook so she can keep up with her grandchildren, spread around the world from New Zealand to Chicago.

This isn’t rocket to science to all the Zoomers out there, after all most of us have been using web apps and services for some time, even those still tied to Office and Outlook.

The main point here is my mother is 79.  And she never was able to understand Windows or Office.

She’s able to get her brain around the different services because the people who built them left out the complexity and provided functional, easy on the eye, collaborative software for free.  And the Microsoft for Dummies book is now totally irrelevant.

She’s organized – knows which apps to use for email, letters, blogging, video conferencing, Instant Messenger, storing pictures – and is connected through social networks and blogs.

The message, to me at least, is simple.  If anybody wants to engage the majority of the population in using software or services they have to make those things simple to learn and use, and highly functional without confusing things and generally getting in the way.

This doesn’t come as any surprise to us.  We built Front Office Box to help people with customers, sales opportunities, plans, schedules and tasks to get organized.

We didn’t want to impress with the number of features.  We didn’t want to get involved in feature marketing.  Most of all we didn’t want to lose people because they couldn’t understand how to use the software,

We simply wanted to help them be organized and able to get on with the day job whilst we handle the complexity.

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Tagged as: Facebook, Instant messaging, Microsoft Office, Outlook Express