The Company: Various
The Product: Clothing
The Rude Awakening: You buy a great-looking new article of clothing. An hour or so after you begin wearing it, you notice that you are starting to feel an intense itching. You reach to scratch the itch and hear a crackling noise.
The Design Flaw: Clothing labels should not be constructed from a crackling blend of plastic, cardboard, and/or stainless steel. Some of the worst offenders are the ladies undergarments. Why did it take the men's undergarment manufacturers to come up with the idea of stamping the label into the cloth of the garment instead of sewing on a label?
"What's the problem?" some people ask. "Just cut the label out." Well, it wouldn't be a problem if that idea actually worked. But when you just trim the lable, the raw edge left behind cuts even worse than the orginal label. If you try to pick the remains of the label out of the stitching, you end up with a hole in the seam. So now you need to make a repair to a brand-new article of clothing!
Monday, March 16, 2009
Meeting or Appointment?
The Company: Microsoft
The Product: Outlook
The Rude Awakening: You double-click to create a calendar item, send out the invitations, and wait for responses. Then you learn that some recipients cannot respond to the invitation, even though they also use Microsoft Outlook. The Accept, Tentative, and Decline buttons are unavailable (grayed out).
The Design Flaw: The words "meeting" and "appointment" are synonymous in the minds of most people. But Microsoft has decided that there needs to be a distinction. Microsoft initiates an "Appointment" instead of a "Meeting" when you double-click on a time slot in the Calendar.
The major Microsoft difference between the two types of Calendar items is that anyone not on your Exchange Server must receive an invitation to a "Meeting" to be able to send a response. People in your organization are free to send a response to either type of event.
If you want to invite people outside of your company/organization, you must take the longer path of selecting "Plan a Meeting" from the Actions menu or "New Meeting Request" from the right-click menu instead of the more intuitive double-click. The default action for double-clicking on a time slot should be to initiate a MEETING.
The Product: Outlook
The Rude Awakening: You double-click to create a calendar item, send out the invitations, and wait for responses. Then you learn that some recipients cannot respond to the invitation, even though they also use Microsoft Outlook. The Accept, Tentative, and Decline buttons are unavailable (grayed out).
The Design Flaw: The words "meeting" and "appointment" are synonymous in the minds of most people. But Microsoft has decided that there needs to be a distinction. Microsoft initiates an "Appointment" instead of a "Meeting" when you double-click on a time slot in the Calendar.
The major Microsoft difference between the two types of Calendar items is that anyone not on your Exchange Server must receive an invitation to a "Meeting" to be able to send a response. People in your organization are free to send a response to either type of event.
If you want to invite people outside of your company/organization, you must take the longer path of selecting "Plan a Meeting" from the Actions menu or "New Meeting Request" from the right-click menu instead of the more intuitive double-click. The default action for double-clicking on a time slot should be to initiate a MEETING.
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