A bit of discussion about my wife and her computer use is a useful follow-up to the previous post. As the Director and an active teacher at a small preschool, she does the finances, prepares documentation of school activities, makes display posters, and answers questions. As an adjunct instructor at the local community college, she generates documents, produces PowerPoint presentations, manages her photo library, and works with videos. Add to all of this the requirements of e-mail, calendars, and the internet and you begin to get the picture of a non-technical person who is actually quite reliant on the computer. While I regard her as pretty capable (especially in comparison to some people I know), she does not have the same view of herself.

In her world of computers, change is not good – so, the desktop box runs Windows 7 even though the laptop and now the Surface are at 8.1. Office is a generation or so behind because she doesn’t want to learn new versions of Word and PowerPoint. So, the desktop is the workhorse and the others are niche machines. Portability and Office will be the levers that pry the Surface RT (and the laptop) off the desk and into her hands. The Surface integration of OneDrive will nudge her down the path to the “cloud” and gradual appreciation of the storage and synchronization advantages. The school’s new web site (still under development) will further all of this by giving her reasons to demand more in the way of features: Internet calendars, .ics files, links, vCards, QR codes – all of these things could find application on the site. Will they? I don’t know, but it will be interesting to watch from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, the Surface RT, which drew so many criticisms when it was on the cutting edge of Microsoft’s tablet vision, seems ideally suited for this user.