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"and above all continuity with what they are used to""and above all continuity with what they are used to"Posted Aug 18, 2006 17:24 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)In reply to: "and above all continuity with what they are used to" by dark Parent article: Free software's secret weapon: FOOGL (Linux Journal) 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.
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"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.
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