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Can Ximian Crash Microsoft's Desktop Party? | |
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| Time: 15:16 EST/20:16 GMT | News Source: NewsFactor | Posted By: Brian Kvalheim | ||
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"The desktop is Microsoft's last stand for near dominance, which will gradually erode with greater awareness of the maturity of Linux desktop offerings," Forrester analyst Stacey Quandt predicts. | ||
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| #1 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 6/30/2003 3:21:15 PM |
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*sigh*
What? Do these people live in an alternate reality? Microsoft's Server Market: Growing by leaps and bounds, largely at the expense of Unix. It's NOT competing with Linux who is eating away at the other side of Unix. Microsoft's Desktop Applications Market: Growing Microsoft's Game Software Market: Growing Microsoft's Hardware (keyboards, mice, etc): Growing Microsoft's Entertainment Systems (XBox, etc): Growing Microsoft's Desktop Operating Systems: Growing (slowly, there's not much room to grow) Linux hasn't made a dent into anything Microsoft is doing. Linux is chipping away at Unix pretty well, but that's the only area where growth can even be measured by anything other than a micrometer. |
| #2 By 13998 (217.122.34.74) at 6/30/2003 6:29:04 PM |
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#3 There is a great difference between Microsoft and IBM.
First of all, back then IBM had stopped listening to their customers, and it seems to me like Microsoft has been a very good listener and still is. Secondly IBM underestimated their rivals, however Microsoft is very careful about it. They study the history well and they don't miss a single rival company whose popularity is increasing and they are taking them serious. Thirdly, and most importanly they have a vision unlike IBM had in those years. They are planning. At some point IBM had forgotten why they really existed. |
| #3 By 12071 (203.185.215.149) at 6/30/2003 8:47:31 PM |
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mOOzilla: Whilst I'm not saying that the UI's [edit] don't [/edit] need to be redone, like you said, a usuable UI from the developer's perspective and a usable UI from the end user's perspective are in 99.9% of cases completely different, however you can't place too much emphasis on the UI, as if that's the only thing holding Linux back. Why do i say this? Firstly because OS X would most likely have the "best designed" UI and it's market share isn't exactly rising dramatically. Secondly because Windows does NOT have the "best designed" UI and it is by far and large the market leader, e.g. menu items, menu's, toolbars, short-cut keys, you name it differ between many applications in Windows. i.e. Yes the UI is important, but it's not of as great an importance as you make it out to be - as end users have shown, good enough is all that's required.
One of the things (as there are many) that need to be worked on and "polished out" are your front-ends for program such as apt-get so that end users don't have to know how to install a new kernel, or application update or driver, all they have to know is how to click on the "update" button. This post was edited by chris_kabuki on Monday, June 30, 2003 at 20:49. |
| #4 By 12071 (203.217.79.68) at 7/1/2003 8:37:43 AM |
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#9 "When I refer to UI, I dont mean button colours and shapes and so on...."
I realise this, and as I mentioned Windows suffers from this exact same problem. To paste something do you use Ctrl+V or Shift+Insert, to perform a search-replace do you use Ctrl+H or Ctrl+R, is the options/preferences menu under Tools? Edit? File? The answer is that it completely depends on the application you are running. Whilst many of those things are uniform across most applications you still need to spend time searching through the menu's orientating yourself. Therefore my point was that even if your UI is all over the place you can still have the majority of the market share - end users will always settle for "good enough". Which is why some but definetely not most emphasis should be placed on the UI in Linux. However, having said that, you're perfectly correct, there needs to be more work done (as there has been some work in this area) to create simple, useful, clear and intuitive front-ends for all the configuration files and settings. As long an an end user can click on an "Update" button on a dialog/window to update the software/drivers automatically and as long as they can change settings as easily as Windows or OS X users can then that will be "good enough". As for making the configuration files in XML - I have mixed feelings about this and see benefits from both sides of the argument. On the one hand, as long as you have the front-ends available it shouldn't matter what format the configuration files are and it would keep many sysadmins happy who work much faster with those plain text config files than they would with gui's. On the other, it would be nice to have all the configuration files in an interchangable format. As for Gimp, I don't like it so I can't honestly defend it =) Then again I've used Photoshop for several years now and therefore I can't help thinking that I've learn the photoshop way of doing things - whether that's the best way is up for argument. i.e. If you're used to something working a particular way, any other way will seem "wrong". |
| #5 By 61 (24.92.223.112) at 7/1/2003 10:34:51 AM |
| It's because everyone cheers the unerdog, whether or not the underdog is truely better or worse (either product line or business ethics) does not matter at all. |
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