It's a mistake to ignore the customer [LWN.net]

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 7, 2012 5:43 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: It's a mistake to ignore the customer by dakas
Parent article: GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

You clearly haven't seen calculator sales this decade or last. TI and Casio have absolutely crushed HP. Both are infix. Coincidence? (maybe, who knows...?)

Don't get me wrong, my HP 48 and RPN rocketed me through 4 years of EE. But most of the other pre-Es in my classes used TI-8x and Casio FX-xxx, I assume partly because they didn't require a tutorial to do the simplest things.

So, be careful rolling out the "most popular among X" argument. Not surprisingly, that almost always supports the infix crowd.

(Log in to post comments)

HP calculators

Posted Dec 7, 2012 15:05 UTC (Fri) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link]

I have an HP calculator that uses RPN. I love it.

However, almost no one else I know of can even USE it, nor are they interested in learning how. If I offered the calculator to them, they'd say no thank you, and get a calculator that supports infix instead. Most people will immediately reject something that doesn't support infix today.

It's time to support modern expectations.