Quoting Ps76 (Thread starter): Please someone take me back to the 90s when the internet was still for geeks! |
Then you'd love my employer's internal websites!
When I first started there in 2001 I was really impressed that the company was pretty much paperless, everything you needed to do you could do on the web.
However, lots of it has not been updated since, and it's all quite quirky. In particular a few key applications still "work best on
IE" which means they barely work at all if you are not using
IE.
The stuff they have updated since (mostly the
HR apps) are using some front end to Oracle that is just not user friendly. Even though it clearly knows things about me, like I'm a salaried employee, I have to trundle through screen-fulls of stuff that are for others who are hourly employees, etc.
And recently
IT has been promoting a new portal that is supposed to integrate internal apps with forums and chat to be this one-stop shopping arena, but it's dreadful. All the glyphs they use are in the cartoonish style that was popular a few years ago but now just looks totally dated, and the portal is nothing more than a bloated front end to the same old user unfriendly internal apps.
The sad part is that a lot of the staff who have been working on that were pulled off development of a software development environment that was replacing a lot of our software tools and processes that date back to the founding of the company in the 80s. There was a regime change in
IT management, and the new guy just didn't care about that stuff, it wasn't glitzy enough, and more importantly, the people doing his reviews didn't use it.
Oh, and we just got single-sign-on a year or so ago, and it's only used by half the apps or so, so those all still have popups to get your password every time you access them.
I have to wonder if many of our key engineering apps will ever be updated. The reality is that the demands of engineers are very hard to meet (one size does NOT fit all!), but my company is a tech driven company and we really are limited by the tools we have access to.
Quoting mhodgson (Reply 10): http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/ it's like a collection of everything you can do wrong with a website, though most isn't really related to modern day internet - remember the days of MIDI music loading and synchronised gifs dancing at once? |
And going to a website and getting inundated with countless popups, thus the invention of the popup blocker?