I Hate Change!

Common Sense
by Cliff Harrison

Bank of America tried it. Wells Fargo tried it. Verizon “Can you hear me now?” Wireless tried it. Countless other big corporations tried it. And the public revolted. Change. Everybody says they want change. But nobody wants change. No, not really.

Google, AdSense; no, AdSense changed to AdWord, Blogger, YouTube, Yahoo!, they’re all making change. Change that is disturbing their customers. More change more tempers flare. More change more people drop the big 1% corporation they love to hate.

Microsoft, oh, don’t get me going.

I do like the changes YouTube made. I especially love their new music “mix” where you can play consecutive songs by the same artist. The one thing YouTube needs to add is the ability to “repeat” a song, like all music players have. I like repeating good songs. You see, I like sticking with what I know. I like sticking with what isn’t broken. I like sticking with what works. I like sticking with what I like. The changes made at YouTube aren’t so drastic that someone who liked the “old version” isn’t satisfied.

Why can’t all America’s corporations learn that?

One thing that never has changed, and it’s Microsoft “Change Daily” is the word processor spell checker. I spelled AdSense the way Google spells AdSense.

No matter how many times I click “ignore” it keeps coming back with the red line under the word indicating it is misspelled. Pssssst! Try clicking “ignore all”. Oh, my God! I thought that read ignorance.

“Ignore all” isn’t available every time, often only “ignore” is. And it keeps coming back.

They seem to change the stuff that works well and they don’t change the stuff that doesn’t work. The problem we have in America is we have too many geeks employed. If we had more geeks in our soup-kitchen lines maybe they’d change the soup-kitchen and give us something decent to eat and leave the rest of the stuff alone.

As I publish this I review the YouTube video that came with the Gmail “New Look”. 41,052 people voted they “liked” the video, meaning they liked the change while a whooping 36,300 disliked the video/change. That is the largest dislike I have ever seen on any YouTube video, nearly 50% of the voters rejected it.

I sort of felt bad after I sent a nasty comment to the geeks for changing Gmail but I don’t feel bad now, read the comments thousands of pissed users posted in the video comments.

I bet tomorrow we’ll hear a lot of the same thing we heard from Bank of American, Wells Fargo and Version Wireless, “Gmail dumps new look for old version after user revolt.”

After you send in a message for ‘feedback’ you are taken to a ‘help’ page which shows all of the Google help centers as if now they want to help you when before you had to pull your hair out in order to get help.

When you go to the menu page you can’t even find AdWord anymore. You have to hunt for it. It used to be first on the list. Google screwed up AdWord so much I’m about to pull the plug on any Goggle product, just like I did Yahoo! and Microsoft. Ignorant idiots!

Google started out a simple company with user friendly features. They should have left well enough alone.

By the way, spam has increased a thousand folds on Gmail.

The only changes Google ought to be making is they ought to fire everybody companywide from top to bottom except the YouTube division.

There is no common sense at Google.

If Google was Bank of America it would be bankrupt.

I rest my case!

Common Sense is a syndicated column by Cliff Harrison.