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Microsoft causes learned helplessness
(lemmy.sdf.org)
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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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I object to the author of this laying all of the blame on MS. Apple software design is the worst offender when it comes to coddling users into a state of being unable to troubleshoot issues themselves, IMO. Want to discover anything more than the extremely limited options available in the GUI? Well too bad, you don't know the secret keystroke. What's that, there's literally no documentation for this CLI utility? An error occurred! Here's an incomprehensible report that looks like a dog's breakfast, good luck. Despite its BSD roots, MacOS is heinously bad in terms of user education, and it is seen as the "easiest OS to use".
I think that Apple might be worse, but Microsoft gets more of the blame because it has much more usage. To be fair to MS, they stole all of their ideas from Apple, so maybe Apple deserves more blame than they're getting.
Anybody who used "classic Mac OS" (before OS X) can tell you that it was even more cryptic and hid more from the user than Windows did. It didn't usually break, but when it did, you just reformat and re-install.
Now now, it's not fair to say things like 'MS stole all their ideas from Apple' without saying 'both of them stole all their ideas from Xerox PARC'...but mostly the good ones. But anyhow, that's old hat and both companies have been iterating on their own platforms for ages since those days and each operating system has mutated into its own particular beast.