Free software's secret weapon: FOOGL (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

"and above all continuity with what they are used to"

Posted Aug 18, 2006 17:24 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

This need for continuity did not prevent the mass upgrades from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows XP, all of which had significantly different user interfaces.

I guess people wanted to get rid of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 as fast as they could, so they had the incentive to upgrade. However, I haven't noticed significant user interface differences between Win95 and WinXP (the default skin is different, but the buttons are at the same place). Oh, and don't forget that at least this part of the world, upgrading from MS-DOS or from Win3.1 wasn't an issue, because people didn't have many PCs before Win95 was released.

Bye,NAR

"and above all continuity with what they are used to"

Posted Aug 18, 2006 23:06 UTC (Fri) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

That's not true, at least not entirely.

I ran a lab using primarily DOS and some windows 3.x in the years you're talking about. Many stayed DOS for several years after 95 came out, by user insistence. Win 3.x was a dog, for sure, but there were many very good DOS applications that were far superior to anything on Win95, and remained in use until deprecated and killed by lack of support. WordPerfect and dBase come to mind immediately. WordPerfect, either 5.1 or 6 (Novell) for DOS were real workhorses people could use to do serious work. The Windows based competition required three times the hardware and didn't work nearly as well even with it. And moving database work from a DOS station to a Windows station was an even bigger loss. Operations took 10 times as long to complete, and crashes were so frequent any sizeable job was effectively impossible under Windows.

If it weren't for the strong-arming efforts to get all the applications folks onto Windows, many tasks would probably have stayed on DOS indefinitely.

"and above all continuity with what they are used to"

Posted Aug 20, 2006 7:57 UTC (Sun) by odie (guest, #738) [Link]

I do some work at a company digitizing textbooks, and they are DOS-based. Most of the work is done with a heavily customized MultiEdit and tonnes of intertwined BAT files. There is no alternative text editor that is so much better that it would motivate porting all the scripts and macros, so there is no reason to switch from DOS.

The largest competitor are using MS Word instead, and from what I hear, their workflow is much more manual and ineffective. Given the nature of the task, I would imagine the main reason they are using Word is that it is newer and more buzz-word compliant.

People will happily go from Windows Last Year Edition to Windows Future Edition regardless of the UI changes, even if their day-to-day tasks are slightly more cumbersome in the new system. Since everything that differs does so because the old system was - well - old, any complaints can be shrugged off as techno-conservatism and refusal to get with the times. Any differences between an old product and a new one are clearly improvements to the new.
Switching to a competing product, however, all differences are down to the new product being different, and suddenly all complaints are valid.

Monopoly Pressures Forced Earlier Transitions

Posted Aug 18, 2006 17:41 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

I think it's unfair to say that the desire/need for continuity wasn't a factor in the transitions from WordPerfect to Word and from DOS to Windows.

My observations and experiences at the time lead me to the conclusion that Microsoft's position as a monopolist by that time gave them enough leverage to force these transitions. I know many people, and of many businesses and whole market segments that staunchly resisted the DOS/Windows migration; and I know that the legal profession and a large number of playwrights and screenwriters clung desperately to old versions of WordPefect for as long as they could. (If fact the transient support for WordPerfect under Linux sparked a few pilot migration projects among law firms --- my wife was a consultant that did at least one of those).

So the need/desire for "continuity" (conversely the resistance to change) is a very real force in the market. Naturally it's not an irresistable force. Ergo the market is not an "immovable object." (As with all such discussions we're all grossly oversimplifying; there is, in reality, not one single market to analyze here --- rather there's a panoply of different market segments intertwined. However, we can observe enough commonality among them to form generally valid conclusions).

"and above all continuity with what they are used to"

Posted Aug 18, 2006 18:12 UTC (Fri) by dns (subscriber, #4239) [Link]

"This need for continuity did not appear to be a stumbling block
when corporations and universities were converting wholesale
from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word."

Boy, I couldn't disagree more! I've been involved in changing the way
people work in industrial and office environments for over 40 years. There
is *always* great resistance to change of any component of workers'
environments, more so if the component is ancillary to their direct
responsibilities, and more so if they are highly skilled craftspersons.

This is only natural and quite appropriate behaviour. How would you
like it if someone told you that "emacs is better and we want to you
start using it now" when you have enormous experience with vi (or
vice versa)? You might be open-minded and take the trouble to
investigate the truth in those claims, but, given the cost-of-change,
you would need real convincing, and even then would change over only
if you had the rare luxury of time to spare.

To this day, there are many very large corporate and government
offices where WordPerfect is still used, because the workers there
developed their skilled jobs using that tool and see no benefit
in re-training. They are almost certainly right.

The change from one version of an operating system to another is
far less disruptive than changing the applications that workers
use *within* the OS. Which is why the change from Windows to Linux
will be a romp compared to changing from Office to Open Office.

"and above all continuity with what they are used to"

Posted Aug 20, 2006 21:07 UTC (Sun) by withaar (guest, #4201) [Link]

"Boy, I couldn't disagree more! I've been involved in changing the way
people work in industrial and office environments for over 40 years. There
is *always* great resistance to change of any component of workers'
environments, more so if the component is ancillary to their direct
responsibilities, and more so if they are highly skilled craftspersons."

Indeed. I helped some people transition, and the greatest frustration is in not being able to do the simple things directly, like starting an application. More people are helped by the start menu on the bottom-left than you know.

Word-Perfect was a far superior product, but was undercut by MS who copied it feature by feature and pushed it with all the marketing power they had. The competitor had limited access to changes in the API and would always be late in updating its own code. How long has it been since MS made significant improvements in IE, since the demise of Netscape?

If you want to see mass adoption, make linux look as similar to XP as you can. Embrace and extend. The desktop is now very configurable, so that is not very hard to do. In fact, it is what major distros do. Once in, you can look at the cool screenshots and decide that you want more. Openoffice is also very similar to MS office in features, and I am sure MS office is being followed. The ODF is a great example of embrace and extend.

The release of vista will be interesting. MS can not change the interface too much, in order to avoid estranging its customer base and opening an opportunity to alternatives. There will likely be configuration options to modify the UI that are off by default, like the active desktop was/is? They will use vista primarily to hammer on "technical superior" and "more secure".

The actual problem is identification of hardware and OS

Posted Aug 18, 2006 20:01 UTC (Fri) by cantsin (subscriber, #4420) [Link]

Mainstream users don't switch to Linux because they are scared of something foreign taking over their PC. The barrier is largely psychological. Many people switch from Windows PCs to Macs - and vice versa. They all adapt to the differences in the GUI quickly because they accept that it is a different machine. (Even though this is not so true anymore.)

A "PC" however is commonly identified as a unity of x86-Hardware and the Windows OS. Most people don't even know exactly which part of the user experience comes from the hardware and which from the software. Changing from a Windows PC to a Mac is like switching from a Ford to a Toyota, with some things expected to work differently. But if Linux gets installed on a PC previously running Windows, it turns one machine into something else, just as if one would enter one's Ford and find its internals - seats, pedals, wheels, switches and controls - rebuilt into a Toyota. Just as the car won't "feel right" to the driver, the converted PC won't feel right to the user.

In other words: Linux will stay alien and be perceived as a trojan horse having taken over one's system unless it behaves 100% like Windows. And if some hardware component shouldn work - a "WinModem", a graphics card, a webcam, a WLAN adaptor - or there's no drop-in replacement of a familiar software application, the system won't be accepted by the user. Sooner or later, it will be reverted to the familiar Windows.

IMHO a working Linux desktop strategy for mainstream users needs to refocus from OS installations on existing PC hardware to a platform strategy similar to the Apple Macintosh: computers with 100% Linux-supported components (without the need of proprietary drivers or third-party patches), a pre-installed, simple to use, plug-and-play, 100% free distribution (Ubuntu IMHO), built as boxes that also look differently from an ordinary PC, with a Penguin logo where a Mac would have an Apple logo.

For lay computer users, the choice to be made should be that of a [Windows] PC, a Mac or a Linux computer. It's not just desirable from a strategic marketing standpoint, but would also help to support and propagate computer hardware with open specifications and free driver support.