On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 11:55:58AM -0600, Ben Stallings wrote:
> I'm enjoying reading this conversation.  In my 20-odd years of experience 
> providing computer support to home and office users, it's my impression that 
> most users care about three things: learning as little as possible, getting 
> their work (or play) done, and exchanging files with other users.

Taking this trend to the limit -> users don't want to learn anything,
they just want to press a button and let the computer figure out what
the problem is, what the solution is and implement the solution.

If you want to implement nails into boards, a couple of swings of a
hammer is all the training that you need. If you want to forecast some
sales figures... you need some more.

> The way I see it, Linux is imitating Windows not because Windows is good, but 
> because it's the de-facto standard.  If you're designing a new car, it 
> doesn't matter how different it is from a Chevy under the hood, but it had 
> better have the controls in roughly the same places as a Chevy or very few 
> people will take the trouble to learn to drive it.
> 
> It is of course true, as Florin says, that babies point at things, but as 
> they grow up they learn to talk, and you could go further and say that they 
> learn to type instead of talking so much.  But drivers don't operate their 
> cars by talking or typing, and there's a good reason for that: inanimate 
> objects (such as engines, tires, roadblocks, etc.) respond to actions, not to 
> words. 

That might have more to do with:
   - 1. ease of implementing a lever compared to a natural language
     processor
   - 2. the reliability of said lever
   - 3. the price of a lever compared with the nlp computer
   - 4. the speed and precision of human reflexes versus speech -
     "Computer, swing the car to the left by 5 degrees."
     "Computer, brake!"
     "Human: Brake argument missing. Do you want me to search for brake 
     in the manual?"
     "Computer, brake, damnit!"
     "Human: Damnit not found. Please wait while I access the
     offline documentation repository..."

>        And although a GUI is more work for a programmer than a command line, 
> it's no less natural for the computer, whose native language is not English 
> any more than it's point-and-click.

GUI/CL is irrelevant. I, as a _USER_ cannot spend time wandering the
menu system in search for the bold command, or move the mouse ever so
slowly over the tool buttons so I can read the tooltip and hope I get
the desired one...

> Where I'm going is that the OSes that gain desktop market share will be the 
> ones that let people learn as little as possible, get their work done, and 
> exchange files with other users. 

Where I'm going at is that dumbing everything down is not a long-term
solution.

>                                  If that means more GUI and less command 
> line, then I'm sorry, but there will be less command line.  And if it means 
> that Linux looks and feels and acts more like Windows in some respects, then 
> as much as we hate Windows, that's where Linux will have to go to gain 
> desktops.  --Ben

And after gaining desktops? That is an end in itself, or just means to
another end?

The problem is that with this "dumbing down" for "gaining market share",
the enthusiasts hope that hardware manufacturers will turn more of their
attention and resources into supporting Linus|*BSD... However this does
not guarantee that drivers will be free (see IBM's ThinkPad with closed
source DVD player). If that's gone, what's left?

Dumb users will be happy to get Windows on their computers. They don't
care about freedom (maybe they will care when it will be too late). They
don't care about improving Linux. They just care about _their_ problem.
Let them be...

florin

PS: I apologize for my vent, but I'm pissed about all that talk that
fills web logs and mailing lists... If half of it would be spent doing
something (even if not related to the problem) everybody would be much
better off (including the DU).

-- 

"If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is."

41A9 2BDE 8E11 F1C5 87A6  03EE 34B3 E075 3B90 DFE4
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