Who decides radical design change?

After the dust for "Seamless" settled, I went to the Star Tribune web edition, expecting to see the usual facsimile edition.  Instead I found a clutter with a page occupying less of the screen than before.

Why do management and designers make radical changes that maybe only a few want?  Many users like the way things work and only want tweaks to fix a few things that don't work well.

Apple is notorious for this.  What worked one way well suddenly works in a completely different way.   Way back in the first decade of the Mac, I looked forward to updates, especially new levels.  Now, I won't touch a new level unless I buy a new gadget.  And many times, I wish I had stuck with the old gadget even if the newer is faster and has more data capacity.

I think the problem is "focus groups".  Management pays a few selected participants to attend a meeting while management watches behind one-way glass.  The moderator works and works to get the participants to agree to management's proposal.  Only when the participants agree to management's proposal do they get their honorarium and get to go home.

I know!  I was in a focus group to approve "Comfort Systems" for the Duluth gas and water department.  Few of us were happy with "Comfort Systems".  We didn't know until later who the entity was; we assumed it was a private utility.

Back to technology: "New and Exciting" may mean "Frustrating and Buggy".

To add insult to injury, Google won't let me scroll the text I pasted here.  It moves the window as a block instead of the text in the frame.  It didn't do that for the last post!!!

Spring skiing in December in Minnesota?

As I walk around Duluth and our cabin in Brimson, I'm amazed at the wet snow on the ground.  Hey, this is December; we're supposed to have white fluffy stuff at least six inches deep.  This snow is like March snow.

This is bad for the tourism industry because fewer people will come to Duluth to ski.  In fact, Spirit Mt. will not be open for a full daily schedule until Dec. 8.  It used to be that ski hills in Minnesota began full-time operation at Thanksgiving, even south of Minneapolis.  Forget "over the hill and through the woods to Grandmother's house…"

It's also bad for all the snowplow operators, public and private.  They will be called out less often.

Almost any change has winners and losers.  The big winners are those who get to spew lots of CO2 and other pollution in the air.  The losers are all those who depend on seasonal shifts, but they're little folk and I guess they don't count.

Am I getting to the age where the disappointment of fewer opportunities to ski are offset by the joy of shoveling less?