Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Correcting on auto

It’s interesting to me—as a product manager & a, you know, human—how software “features” are often not actually “benefits”.

Take autocorrect for example. I’ve shared my bemusement with that feature before, especially since it’s incorporated into MS Word’s spell checker.

(Think on that for a mo—software engineers determining what people who write for a living should have by way of a dictionary.)

You know—the helpful little electronic toerag that claims you’ve entered something non-existent (like Aeneid), or else it just quietly changes what you’ve written to something else without asking your permission.

So of course you find memes like this popping up around the interwebs:


Autocorrect shows up in SMS software, too. The other morning it changed “Saturday” to “A Stuttgart” in a text I was sending.

I have no mother-forklift idea why.



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