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Showing posts from June, 2005

The end of desktop software

Our engineering team has grown quite a bit, and I needed to better track our 1.0 release process. It has been a while since I have directly managed an engineering project, but I have done it before with Microsoft Project. So I order it and it arrives a couple of days later. I then had a very bizarre experience, almost like an archaelogical dig. It was a shrink wrapped box entitled "Microsoft Project 2003". 2003??? This code hadn't been touched in three years! I opened the box (yes, it is still a pain) and took out the CD and installed the software. I haven't installed software like this in years. I then entered everybody's tasks, task hierarchies, and such. Project was incredibly difficult to use, stuff that should have been obvious was very obtuse. Then I wanted to publish the Gantt chart in HTML for our intranet. Tried for hours. Couldn't do it. Finally I printed out the chart, taped six sheets of paper together, and posted it on the wall in our