Users? The government don’t need no steenking users…
Today I finally heard about a brouhaha that made me sad… apparently grants.gov, the site that was to promote electronic submissions of government grants, does not support Macintosh computers.
“What’s the big deal?” you ask, “After all, only 7% of the world works on Macs.”
Well, then you haven’t done the research either. 30% (I’ve heard up to 55%) of education and research folks work on Macs. It doesn’t bother me that you don’t know, but it does bother me that a grant-organization part of our government who should know doesn’t.
It’s triggering the eternal complaints of Mac marginalization, and I still haven’t heard if it works any better in Linux. Sounds like not. There are discussions of workarounds and quips that it doesn’t even work on Windows, but the simple truth is that this could have been easily avoided if the implementers had half a clue about their requirements.
Proper design is always cheaper than fixes, and that’s my tax money you’re wasting.