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This politics of innovation/change in the UI of KDE or even MS Office is interesting to me. The updated version of the Matthew Paul Thomas critique on free software usability that someone mentioned has several points in the ballpark, here's one that's relevant:

13. Release early, release often, get stuck. The common practice of "release early, release often" can cause poor design to accumulate. When a pre-release version behaves a particular way, and testers get used to it behaving that way, they will naturally complain when a later pre-release version behaves differently -- even if the new behavior is better overall. This can discourage programmers from improving the interface, and can contribute to the increase in weird configuration settings.

Solution: Publish design specifications as early as possible in the development process, so testers know what to expect eventually.

Basically, once you've implemented something, some users will strongly resist change even if it is better.

That's one of the things that makes it tough to change the course of a big tanker like a Linux desktop environment, even if you do have someone at the helm punching in coordinates for the promised land.

Why link to the outdated version of Mathew Paul Thomas' article when he wrote a much newer one here: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability Appropriately, it's titled: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it

Haha! In a comment you wrote on the blog post you linked to, you wrote about Bill Gates' predictions and how they aren't coming true, and ended it with:

Oh yeah, and in five years everyone will be foregoing the keyboard and surfing the Web with voice recognition

I just HAVE to point you to this -- it's pure gold, if you haven't seen it already :-)

1. [He] Did not make a good case that usability is a "Major Problem" in OpenOffice and MOST linux distro's when compared to MS products.
2. Sweeping statements like "the open source communities (should) improve their development methods". Actually, these development methods are revolutionary, and all but the best funded orgs cannot keep up to it. Even traditional source control methodologies/products cannot handle it!

If you followed and read the link I provided above, that page makes quite a good case about what is wrong with the development process with regards to the usability and design aspects and what needs to be changed. While the overall development process could be considered revolutionary in comparison with closed source projects, the end result from a UI perspective, at least from the POV of a typical (non-geek) end user, can't quite compete.

Compare, for example, the graphic design quality of icons used throughout the system and various applications on Linux, Windows and OS X. Of course, OS X wins that hands down, but even XP's and Vista's look quite reasonable. Also, look at the default theme of Ubuntu: it's predominately brown, which is not at all attractive. Sure, it can be changed, but first impressions last.

One of the major problems is that open source software like OpenOffice.org and most Linux distributions are seriously lacking good UI design and usability. I know there are geeks who will argue that they're easy to use, but the problem is that a lot of open source software has been designed by geeks, for geeks. (Although, I will admit that Vista has also become largely unusable in many ways)

I don't blame them for opting for more usable alternatives, despite the cost and security problems with Windows. But I think taking legal action to force them to use free software is the wrong approch. I think the right approach is for the open source communities to improve their development methods and spend more time designing usable and attractive software.

mpt is hired by Canonical to do exactly this. A few years ago he wrote a brief summary of what he thought was wrong, and cataloged the resulting progress in the next release. This is a guy who knows how to do that. I do agree that he'd be better served by writing to the public more than once a year though.

The main problem is, I think, unsolvable

This would be true if FOSS were solely developed by volunteers, only interested in their own preferences, but there are two other groups to take into consideration:

1. power users who like the idea of FOSS, whom use it and want it to work for their friends and family;
2. companies that market and sell support for FOSS desktops;

We haven't seen good usability in FOSS products due to the reason you mentioned: the software developers have been the only stake-holders in the process. That situation is changing. For example: the person who wrote the article, works for Canonical. It is in Canonical's interests to get as many users on Ubuntu as possible, this is all part of fixing bug #1!. Canonical can afford to pay usability experts to improve FOSS, and as average users try things out, they -- or their power user friends -- will raise bugs when usability issues arise.

Great progress is being made, if you check out Matthew's previous blog post on usability issues, from when he first started working for Canonical, you'll see most of the problems shown there have been fixed.

The only thing I see standing in the way, are developer egos. I personally hope these can be worked around!

Poor usability? Is there really anybody who thinks that Internet Explorer 7's user interface is better than Firefox 3's?

I'm getting tired of hearing this over and over again. For example, in the past 7 years, GNOME has invested an insane amount of effort in usability. Go read about all those professional GNOME usability studies that Sun has funded. Also, go read Ubuntu and "desktop environments", written by the same author who wrote TFA. In that article, he criticizes people for wanting to include a configuration option in Ubuntu's installer which asks the user whether he wants GNOME, KDE or XCFE. He argues that such a choice is simply too confusing to most non-technical people. And indeed, people like my dad and mom don't know, or want to know, what GNOME is.

In the past 7 years, GNOME has done its best to address exactly that kind of criticism. Almost every single feature is scrutinized with usability in mind. GNOME has been removing more and more configuration options from the user interface in order to make things easier for the average user. In fact, they've done so much their best that the technical audiance, i.e. Slashdot/OSNews/Reddit, is constantly flaming them for removing config options. Yet this same audience is flaming them for not being usable.

KDE, too, has invested a lot of effort in usability. But what's the community doing? Instead of offering helpful feedback, perhaps mockups or even professional usability studies, they're flaming the developers. By flaming, instead of offering useful feedback, they're discouraging the very people who made the software from improving it. And you're wondering why they're having a hard time?

Go figure.

BG has never shown much vision in terms of knowing what lies ahead.

May be IBM is going to make speech recognition true, but Bill Gates said that this was posible a long time ago. Simply genius.

Slightly old, but good:

http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/12/27/web-2

Well look at what Bill's had to say about speech recognition over the years!!

It should be noted that em and strong are not 100% equivalent to i and b . Specifically, you should also be using cite, var, dfn, and a few others when you are actually dealing with a book title, a variable name, or a word that's defined in the sentence it's in.;)