Blog Assign 1

Think of some piece of technology that you have recently purchased or a piece of software or feature of an existing piece of technology that you have recently started using.
Think about why you made this decision - what factors caused the "adoption."
Now - talk about your experience ... and then think about the theories we've talked about in class. Which theories help explain your behavior?
I just started using IE7. Why? Because I figure the less software on my machine the better. I've always used IE, I like IE, I haven't found anything that IE can't do. And lots of sites don't work on firefox and the others.

Now, why IE7. Well I figure if I'm going to have to answer people's questions on IE7, I should have at least tried to use it, right? So I downloaded the beta version and installed it. To my surprise, it didn't crash. It installed happily, and came up.

The only annoying part of the install is it defaults my search bar to windows live. I happily changed that to google, and was very impressed with MS since it was an option! Anyway, so now running my IE7 successfuly. I have happily gotten used to tabbed browsing and find that for many things I still like a new IE window. But its nice to have the option.

The only thing I think they made a HUGE mistake with in terms of adoption is that they took away the menu bar. Error messages say go to tools -> options -> but there is no tool menu, no file menu. Now its easy to put back of course, but I know I will have to MANUALLY put it back on many of my users machines. Sigh. Why take it away? Isn't it kinda important?

Now that its not beta, I'm still using it without problem. I guess it wasnt different enough to bother me or have a large learning curve, its supposed to be safer, and will be the new thing people will start using. Thats fine with me, I get tabs.