Change Is Bad!

Despite the recent Presidential election results, people aren't generally too keen to accept change, much less embrace it. It usually boils down to "fear of the unknown" and going beyond one's established comfort zone. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, and I'm generally of the opinion that there's always room for improvement and that can't be achieved if you don't change. Change isn't always a good thing, of course, and change should have meaning and at least make an attempt to improve on what had been the status quo. But many people often don't/won't/can't see that.

Case in point...

I went to the comics page I have set up in my iGoogle last night to find that one of the comics gadgets I subscribed to was behaving differently. Instead of pulling in my comics and displaying them at the very bottom of the page, it was now asking for me to reselect which comics I wanted to view to display them in with the rest of my content. And when I did so, it now began placing the comics within the context of my page, instead of at the very bottom like it had before. Since there was no announcement per se, it did take a few moments to understand what had happened, but it also took me very little time to see how this was an improvement.

First, it allows users to place their selected comics where they might best enjoy them, instead of forcing everyone to view them in the same place. The programmer had also re-written some of the code to adjust the width of each comic to fit whatever space it was put within, a very useful feature for especially wide comics. (Which, I might add, comes in doubly-usefully in the wake of last week's sudden change over at comics.com whereby any single panel cartoons are now twice as large as they used to be. While I appreciate being able to see more detail, it did cause some significant layout problems on my comics page.)

Now, the changes this programmer put in place aren't perfect. There's some comments about problems in certain versions of Internet Explorer, and there are some usability issues that could stand to be addressed in my opinion. But, his previous version of the gadget wasn't perfect either. And, rather than trying to fix a bunch of minor problems, he gave the whole thing an overhaul.

Comments about it over the past couple of days include...

...Please give us back the old style...

...The comics displayed better the old way...

...I don't like this one...

...Please change your gadget back to the way it was a week ago. Please! Please...

...It's Terrible...

...Change it back...

...Nope. Don't like it all....

...WTF???

Now, granted, some people were complaining because they were running into specific problems with IE. But most seemed to be irritated that things were different. "It's not what I'm used to!" I think I was the only one who left an even remotely positive comment.

Or how about the fact that no traditional comic publish has done more than tip their toe into the webcomic waters?

Or how about the whole "Spider-Man no longer married to MJ" business?

Like I said, not all change is good. But when it does happen, take a step back and see what opportunities the changes provides for you. Doing it the old way just because it's how you've always done it is why buggy whip manufacturers are few and far between any more.

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