Microsoft Word Users Are Stuck in the 90s and Don't Know How To Collaborate

Eugene van der Merwe — Thu, 27 May 2021 07:36:21 +0000

Disclaimer: This is a highly opinionated piece.

I worked for Microsoft in 1997 for 6 months and was fired
I do respect the company, especially since Satya Nadella has taken over as he seemed to modernise the organisation

Although I think they’ve built a great company, Microsoft entirely missed the cloud in the early years. But by sheer market dominance Word as a product has persisted.

I totally feel sorry for people who use Word. Not that there's anything wrong with the actual software, it probably works very well. The part that makes me feel sorry for people who use Word is that they don’t know how to collaborate.

They live on little islands where their document is the be-all end-all of existence. Any changes will always need to be made by them, for them, on behalf of them. Revisions? What revisions?

Does anyone else want to make a change? Maybe some comments or a suggestion? This could take a while. It has to be saved first. Then it has to be attached. Then it has to be emailed as an attachment. Then maybe it needs to be printed out and scribbled on. Then maybe it must be handed back. Or maybe a new version must be created, saved, attached, and sent back. Rinse, repeat, rinse.

I truly cannot see how a modern organisation can agree that people use Word. How on earth can you operate and create constant improvement in any organisation by restricting people with Word and forcing them into this tortoise like workflow? Do people really think their documents are so great that it doesn’t need to be collaborated on? Is this the arrogance of the non-team worker?

What I’ve learnt is that some people just don’t get the cloud. It’s either that, or they don’t get digital teamwork. Or maybe working with other people is so low on their priority list that they simply can’t do it.

For many years I’ve thought it’s a generational problem, but since then I’ve learnt that even kids of today do not embrace collaboration on documents. For some, it’s privacy, and that I respect. For others, it just doesn’t come on the radar.

Before you say that Office 365 allows collaboration, please quickly show me anyone actually using it collaboratively. I’ve yet to see anyone but if you know of someone leave me a comment as I need some hope.

My suggestions?

Embrace collaboration to build an agile organisation
Share documents, and share them early
Learn to digitally work in a team.
Google’s software (I don’t know what it’s called anymore because it changes names every few years) allows collaboration. I’m sure there are other tools too, but perhaps get your feet wet here first.

And if you still don’t understand collaboration in the cloud, good luck! Enjoy that Island.

The Closing Down of Laravel Academy Cape Town

Eugene van der Merwe — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 13:36:30 +0000

In the last six months I have decided to close down a business I started two years ago called “Laravel Academy Cape Town”.

To be honest this business never really made it from the start. There are so many reasons for it. Starting a new business is a risky (ad)venture!

Here is some background and some of the reasons why I am closing up shop on ”The Academy”:

I love Laravel. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying I am fanatical about Laravel. Laravel is an extension of another part of computer science that I love so much namely programming. And I love people and to explain tech stuff.

But make no mistake, I am not a teacher. I just love to make breakthroughs in understanding and to break down concepts into more everyday simplistic forms. I’ve never held a teaching job in my life except for here and there, mostly work related things where I had to explain tech or products to other people.

The first part of why this academy failed was the venue. At the time I started I had a vague idea that OfferZen Make would be willing to let me use or rent their venue for a good price. And for the very first class that was indeed the case - I didn’t have to pay a cent. However, straight after that, OfferZen Make moved their venue and re-invented their business model so I lost the venue. That was quite a big setback.

The second part of why the academy failed is it’s offline. Although teaching in person is super exhilarating (to me at least!) that’s not how it’s done in tech. In tech, the best teachers reach for scale. People like Jeffrey Way and Povilas Korop have mastered teaching Laravel online. It’s not that I knew Jeffrey existed, in fact, the first four years of my Laravel career was chasing Laracasts.com as hard as I could. I also heavily promoted Jeffrey Way and Laracasts in my first (and only!) class as I really think he is top of his game.

But “competing” offline with "online" as a tech teacher is just dumb.

The third reason why the academy failed is because I did it for love. Being passionate about business can sort of work, but in this case emotion was a hindrance and made things look unrealistic and rosy. I had zero academy experience and it would have taken years to build one up, unless I had investment. And I’m not really someone who chases investment whilst I’m busy building so hard.

The fourth reason why the academy failed is because my attention went elsewhere. I started three businesses at the time of starting the academy, namely a hosting business (Vander Host), and a programming company (specializing in Laravel of course) called Fintech Systems.

This whole mission of a career change to programming and an academy and so on started when I fell in love with Laravel and programming all over many years ago. So when I started the academy at the beginning of 2019, I suddenly went into overdrive being an entrepreneur again, and tried to get programming jobs too. The fact is you can only do so much with your time, and a new business, e.g. an academy, takes a huge amount of focus. Multiple businesses meant less focus.

I would like to emphasize that there is no loss to me in closing down the business. I didn’t learn that much in the adventure, except perhaps that I am not good with building a teacher-led academy and that offline doesn’t compete well with online.

I’m not blaming Covid either, but certainly looking into the future the world of teaching has now accelerated hecticly fast to the online world.

In terms of money, I spent around $4000 on 12 Intel NUC PCs which I’ve started handing out in the last few months. I can sell the computers, but they are so cute and nice I don’t feel monetary value attached to them. Plus they run Linux Mint so well that I feel I’m doing my friends and some random people some good. And I love my own NUC, 32 GB RAM and so quiet and small and blissful in the corner.

I didn’t even spend much time developing the academy either. It just, well, failed.

The plus side of this is I am able to make this decision. I had an Internet Café business many years ago that didn’t make money and I was emotionally attached and couldn’t close it down. This time, no problem.

The minor resources I’m saving are:

No more “another Twitter handle”
Another WordPress marketing website
One less email address

Less technical debt. What a blessing.

Adios Laravel Academy Cape Town <3 I loved the idea of you

DEV Community: Eugene van der Merwe

Microsoft Word Users Are Stuck in the 90s and Don't Know How To Collaborate

The Closing Down of Laravel Academy Cape Town