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Crack Mac team stymied by a WinDoze White House
This has got to be beyond painful for Obama staffers.
Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages
It’s bad enough to have to curtail their relentlessly successful use of social networking tools, but it seems communication team members couldn’t even update the new White House website from their offices:
“One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.”
The article tries to place the blame on “federal bureaucracy”, but I think it’s more a reflection of the previous administration’s attitude toward communication and technology than anything else.
UPDATE: Gawker's technology blog Vallywag has a slightly different take: This is not a story about digital pioneers getting cast back into the Stone Age; it's about a privileged elite learning how the rest of the country has to work. LMAO! As a Mac user forced to wrestle with WinDoze at the office, I empathize. Valleywag's advice to the Obama team?
Stop whining about the tools taxpayers have paid for, and get to work learning how to cope with what your employer gives you, just like the rest of us.
