[russnewcomer]

If that is the takeaway you got from my comment, I am sorry for bad phrasing on my side. I was trying to short, pith, koan-like. Can I try again?

Almost no one want to use the tool. They want to use the tool to do the thing they want to do. For example, it is rare that someone would buy a piece of wood just so they could cut with their new saw. They might decide to make a table so they can cut with their new saw, but they are not going to use a tool to use a tool, it has to provide clear value to them. In this case, for this person, they were willing to learn new technologies (as I think evidenced by using DosBOX on an iPad in 2012, though I didn’t say that in the original comment, this was a very very clunky system then. I think they didn’t use an external keyboard) but not for the thing that was on their critical path, if there was not a clear improvement in outcome.

I didn’t provide a clear improvement in outcome, I just provided a better tool. After this person had been doing their job for as long as they had, using the tool they had, investing in a better tool for that job didn’t make sense. They also knew whoever came after them would probably not want to use their tool there, so why change it?

Put yet another way (since I didn’t do a great job the first time, I’ll try again), nobody wants to use business software. I have written line-of-business, not consumer, software most of my career. Even now, where I work and we have a solidly engineered, designed, custom CRM/glue software that was been improving since the late 90s that really fits the business well, no one goes into work in the morning thinking, ‘yay, I get to use our CRM today!’ And definitely no one thinks, ‘yay, I get to use JIRA and SAP today!’ They may think, if they even think about our software at all, ‘hey, this doesn’t stink’ but a recently I found out someone was exporting a table of data to Excel and then spending 4-8 hours a week creating a report, and I was able to turn that into the press of a couple buttons and picking a few values in a day, and now they get to do more of the things that bring our company value and make their job more interesting and they love that they get to use my software to do it. They don’t care that I used a mini Vue app with an AJAX call to create the interface instead of our older form/POST paradigm, they care about what the tool let them do.

That’s the value that I see computer systems, when thought about and executed well, providing to users everywhere. Not doing tasks better, but doing the right tasks, for the right people, at the right time.

To extend this yet another way, and hopefully establish my point firmly, I was thinking of the above situation as a win-win. I got to say just use Excel, they got to use a modern piece of software, what would be better? In the same way, the guys in my company’s IT Operations group see saying that the new hotel desks in the office are all double 24 in monitor setups. I do not really like using double monitors, I prefer one large monitor, like the 32in that is still kicking at the office from the pre-COVID times. I asked them to just give me one flex desk that had the large monitor, that I could use when I came in, we already have the monitor, please! But they feel like it would generate more tickets, and they are already overworked(and they are!) so no single monitor for me. They see it as win-win, they reduce their ticket burden, have more time for other things our manufacturing conglomerate needs, most people like dual monitors, so overall win-win. But I don’t like it and now my weekly trip into the office is a little less comfortable because my ergonomics are wrong, my muscle memory for where my windows are is wrong, and yes I can learn new things but the tools are made for man, not man for the tools.

I know that was long, hopefully that helped clarify my comments.