Bad Choice: Giving The User No Choice

I’ll keep mouth shut or this turns into fifth comment war about Vista.

Seriously I am more often bothered by obviously lacking features than extra unneeded ones.

rarst - what’s wrong with vista? are you saying mac is better?? yo momma uses vista.

Too many choices are bad too. Try reading PDF on windows and eviewer, the PDF reader for Ubuntu and you will love eviewer, simply because it has only 3 buttons (forward backward and something else.)

For every configuration alternative you provide someone, you create another “branch” in the support tree of possible problems, behaviors, and solutions. I’m not justifying lack of choice, I love choice and I agree with your assessment in the phone case.

But I sympathize with the other end, too. Every time you offer a new feature, it expands your support issues, so you are incented to keep the choices within a “certain range.” Of course, this range differs from person to person and so no product will ever be perfect in everyone’s eyes. Especially when someone uses the product in a way none of the designers foresaw.

I agree with you about blue lights, my brother-in-law bought a new Dell with a big, honking, blinking blue light when it sleeps and it lives in the guest room and it’s *very* bright at night! I’m sure nobody at Dell thought about this use case, though.

But when you come upon something like this, email the company, maybe your use case will be considered in the next version of the product! At least then, if they don’t do it, it’s because they *chose* not to, not because nobody thought of it.

King I can understand that companies want to keep their products as simple as possible to reduce support and maintenance costs of the product.

I still prefer to have more choice and I do not think that it should be a huge issue in most cases for the companies to implement those options.

When given many choices, many users will start to complain: why can’t you make Windows installation simpler? Why is it not smart enough, and ask me every little detail?

You could simply bust the blue LED like I’ve done on several gadgets of mine. I’ve even done it to the led under the scrollwheel in my mouse. Just don’t bust the LED for the laser.

This is one of the primary reasons I use Linux.
@King: I agree 100%. Evince, the PDF reader I use over here in Ubuntu, loads MUCH faster than Adobe Reader. The document is far easier to read and work with as well.

Justin I mean to offer a simple setup and a custom setup. Users who do not want choice can use the simple setup, everyone else could use the custom one. Heck, they can even hide it from the normal installation and offer it only by issuing a specific command.

I can agree with you on that.

On Nokia, is N73 emitting a blue LED light like N81 is emitting a white LED light? My N81 is also flashing an LED every now and then when in sleep mode. But, I don’t really find it annoying though.

One of my biggest complaints about lack of choice is software that, when installed, doesn’t give you the following choice:
where to place the program’s icon in the Start Menu.

Beyond that, I have several titles from Wondershare (mostly obtained from Giveaway of the Day), that are spectacular programs. My choice complaint? The programs create a folder in your My Documents each time you open them (supposed to be the default Save location). I’d like to be able to decide where to save my work, and I’d like to keep my My Documents folder uncluttered!

Hehe no I agree on this one… I simply cant understand why Microsoft provides so few options for customization…

Considering users will find a way to change things anyway, why make it so difficult? In based on the fact Microsoft does deals like 20% discounts to Ultimate Vista users who purchase Stardock, they obviously have no problem with people changing Windows, so why make it necessary to patch the files?

Ahh well…