Bigger Equal Not as Good

Okay, what is with the current trend that bigger is always better. A long time ago, I became interested in creating web pages. This was a long time ago and things were much simpler. I search the mostly free internet on my V90 modem and then bought a book on HTML. My first couple of pages were done on notepad and were fairly simple. Later, my brother-in-law, who is a computer programmer by profession gave me an older copy of MS Frontpage and I found a simpler, although sometimes just as frustrating, way to do things. Now at that time there were not a lot of people around doing webstites, so I was able to pick up a little spare cash helping people with this. Anyway, I eventually bought an expensive suite of programs to make ever larger and more complicated interactive sites and although I seldom do a webpage anymore, even a personal one, I have kept the programs pretty up-to-date incase I ever want to.

Well the other day, two of the programs in the suite stopped working. The acted like they had never been completely installed, but I could not install or repair them. There was a little project I wanted to do with one program and after 3 days of fighting and cussing, I finally discovered that I had a conflict with another program and which program the conflict was with.

So I uninstalled both programs and reinstalled, and uninstalled and reinstalled and bashed my head against my desk and repeated, but it seemed that the two sets of software could not be on the computer at the same time and have both work, even though they were doing that exact thing last week. AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

To shorten it some, after adding about 6 million hits to Google I was able to find the 79 individual folders, well maybe only 52, that the programs installed in various places and with various names, on my pc and many of which the uninstall feature did not even touch, and manually delete them all. I also found that the conflicting program shared files with a completely unrelated program by the same company and of course that program had to go also.

I then reinstalled my suite of programs which worked. I then reinstalled my other program which also worked. Then I tested my suite of programs again and they still worked. The third program I just left off until I need it again. That was a lot of stupid work, I do not understand why it is necessary to spread components of applications all over my computer. And why change the names of the installation folders. Some file names were related to the applications, some named after the parent company, some named after the company that owns the application manufacturer. For all I know some of the folders are named after the thirdshift janitor's pet iguana.

Why is it now neccessary for a computer application to do everything in the world. We have operating systems with built in word processors, data base programs, spreadsheets, image editors, video editors, dvd burning software, animation software, and they even mow the lawn and cook supper. I remember when you had an operating system and then you had a different program for every function. For instance you had windows, navigator, word perfect, lotus 123, and d-base. Then internet explorer came out and fought with navigator. MS Word took on WordStar and WordPerfect. Eventually the programs would import other types of files, then sharing files. I remember when buying a "suite" of related programs was bad. You were supposed to use the best program for the job then fight to get the next program to work with the file. You might use lotus to organize your data then fight to get it into d-base. Eventually MS Office won because you could bounce the same file between all the applications without loosing a half day of work figuring out how to import and export in the proper format. It even included a personal organizer and email program.

Store are doing the same thing. I used to like Walmart. I could pick up toothpaste, a cd, a bag of dog food, underwear and a hammer in one stop. This was cool. It also made the hardware store,
clothing store, and music shop go belly up, but it made life easier for me. Then Walmart decided that people needed to buy more stuff from them so now they want me to buy my groceries, tires, mufflers, get family photos made, my dental work done, and buy my contacts there. It's now too big and a pain in the ass. You can't park in the lot during the day. You have to take a shuttle to the store to make it there and back on the same day, and the store is so big that first you need to rent a scooter to get through it and second, you can't find what you were looking for. They need a medium size army to staff the place, but they are only willing to pay a small size army so don't expect to actually find any help if you need it.