Designing an application is a balance between making it easy to learn and easy to use.  Something easy to learn may require additional instructions, work breakdown or examples.  Something easy to use, on the other hand, assumes mastery of the domain knowledge an tool, and attempts to streamline the task at hand.

To quote a Japanese proverb, vision without action is a daydream.

I was working on dashboards within a logfile collection last week, when I was challenged how to determine the right components for the dashboard, and had several insights.

An analogy that caught the industry interest recently is a comparison of IT delivery styles with how we treat pets versus cattle.*  In a nutshell:

• Pets are owned in small numbers, uniquely named, hand reared and lovingly cared for — they are, by all considerations, members of the family. When they get ill, you nurse them back to health.
• Cattle are owned in large numbers, tagged using a standard system, identical, managed in herds, and bought and sold as a commodity — they are, in effect, food. When one gets ill, you replace it with another one.

Clippy was ahead of his time.

I'll let that sink in.

Clippy, the infamous Microsoft Office assistant,  was introduced in November 1996. He was refined three years later, in Microsoft Office 2000. He went into retirement two years later, when he was turned off by default. And he finally departed this digital veil in 2007, when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together.