"and above all continuity with what they are used to" [LWN.net]

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

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

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"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".