People don't like change!

This is something I encounter quite a lot in my professional life but lately I've found it in my personal life too.

In my work life I see a new feature being introduced in software and people immediately hate it. This isn't just in software I'm involved with. A classic example is Facebook. Almost as soon as Facebook announces a new feature there is a message going around about how you can protest or keep the old way of doing it.

The problem for me is that there generally isn't anything wrong with the improvement that's been implemented - it's purely that people don't like change and prefer things "as they were". I tend to find that a few weeks later, people are used to the feature, have stopped complaining about it and probably now quite like it.

It's for this reason that I think it's really important that people involved with software development don't automatically react to the public outcry of disgust about a new feature or an improvement to the user interface.

Most of the time, the changes have been debated at length and every aspect of the changes scrutinised to ensure that the change is for the better. It isn't possible for a casual user without access to all of the feedback from the different users of the system to perform this sort of analysis.

In my personal life, I have just moved house to a small village. A few days after we moved it there was a meeting of the Parish Council. We were invited to the meeting by a neighbour and we thought it would be a good way to meet the other neighbours.

When we got to the meeting we discovered that the main issue and the reason that the Parish Council was having its first meeting in more than a year was that there is a proposed wind farm within a few miles of the village.

The farmer who's land the wind farm would be on was at the meeting and seemed very well informed about the whole plan and had been to see other wind farms to understand the full implications of the proposed project.

Anyone who has travelled a lot around Europe in the past few years will have seen wind farms absolutely everywhere. Personally, I really like them. I think the turbines are graceful and interesting and the fact that they are generating clean energy is a bonus.

Unfortunately, the local residents are totally opposed to the idea. This is despite the fact that there is a large wooded area between the houses and the proposed wind farm so they won't be able to see it at all. On top of that, there is a constant background noise from a nearby main road so they won't be able to hear anything. That doesn't stop them wanting to prevent the scheme.

Sadly, these days, nobody wants coal fired or nuclear power stations but it seems they don't want wind power either - well, they probably do as long as it's not near their house!

I really think that it's a shame that more people aren't open to change. Change is inevitable in virtually every area of life one way or another and resisting it will probably just make those people much less happy than they could otherwise be. I just guess it's a good job we're not all the same!