While researching a programming problem yesterday, I found a wonderful signature block on a message from someone named Alf P. Steinbach:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
Once I got to the bottom line and figured out what it was, it gave me a geek laugh the likes of which I haven’t had in weeks. 🙂 I know that most businesspeople prefer top-posting, and when communicating with them I’ll often go with it, but as an old-school e-mail user (I started in the late eighties), I find it ridiculously annoying.
The reason why they like it is that people don’t tend to re-edit the quotes by quoting only part of them, because it’s too much trouble, especially if you’re going to top-post out of context anyway. Therefore it makes it easier to “audit” what people had said before. Yet another reason though I hate top-posting of course is that it’s designed to be hard to re-edit, if you want to call that “design”, unfortunately some software is written to do that, especially on mobile phones…
To which I say “bah. Humbug!” 🙂 (Modern translation: that’s nonsense.)
Yeah. it does look like after-the-fact reasoning, I guess Outlook probably wasn’t designed with anything much in mind other than getting something out the door before IBM/Lotus and other competitors did. 😉
And then getting ignored by a company that rightly assumed that people would take whatever they deigned to offer, no matter how crap it really was. 🙁
I should mention of course, that believe it or not the consensus is that Lotus Notes is even worse than Outlook+Exchange. 😉 There needs to be a replacement for Outlook+Exchange though, right HG? 😉
You’d think someone would be working on something like that, wouldn’t you?