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Is Windows Ready For Joe Longneck?
Carewolf writes "Is Windows ready for the desktop? We have heard it year after year, that now is the time for Windows on the desktop. But is it really time? Richard K. Yamauchi at OSNews don't think so and has writen a piece that list a number of issues that needs to be solved before Windows is really ready for the masses and "Joe Longkneck"."
In the article they point to netcraft which lists a windows 2000 box as being up for 2 years, in the same list (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.last.html ) they also have Mac OS X machines that have been up 1340 days which puts it's last reboot at 3.67 years ago, but the problem is Mac OS x was only released in early 2001, so it could have been up for at MOST 2 years, me thinks these stats arent worth anything.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
HOW can you possibly say that with a straight face and mean it? Unless you really believe it. Please tell me, AC, how different from NT 4.0 or 2000 that XP really is? Oh wait, it boots faster? Or hold on a sec, the games are in a completely different place. Or maybe it's this new fast-user switching?? Gee, that is kinda rough.
Now how about copy-paste? Still CTRL-C, CTRL-V huh? Hmm... Alt-F4? Still works. Still got the minimize, maximize, close and system buttons on the title bar... doubleclicking the titlebar still maximizes... pgup pgdown still work...
Please, I'm VERY curious to know. Just how unusable is XP? Really? I mean, this row of secretaries over here saving dozens of trees by using Word Excel and Email are really confused because they're getting their jobs done with an obviously broken operating system...
</rant>
Funny article ...
My Dad , a "Joe Longneck" indeed, really Likes Windows XP. Go figure. He digs the Media Player, the new GUI and the stability (he upgraded last year to a Dell P4 1.4 from a Whitebox P2 266 running Win 98)
His only complaint is that the GUI should have defaulted to the old look so he knew where everything was. Didnt take long for him to figure out ho to change it all back.
Go Dad !
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
If the distro had:
-an MSword clone (and plug and play printer support)
-a p2p app
-a CD/DVD player
-a CD burning app
-a browser
-an email client
if all these things had an icon on the desktop that they could just double-click and use; if all of these things had a decent UI so you could use them without having to learn how; if game developers started making the latest games available on linux; and if, and this is the most important if, if people understood that switching to linux would mean that their 1.8 ghz pentium 4 which right now runs like a 386 because it's so smothered in adware, spyware, and conflicting whatevers, would actually run as fast as it should AND it wouldn't crash 3 times a day; they would switch in a second.
If at any point they have to type "make," or even look at a CLI, forget about it.
c-hack.com |
I'll have to disagree with you on this here. In its shipping configuration, windows xp CAN make cds, but cannot eidt video (the version of movie maker that ships with XP is a joke), pictures, and windows media player is one of the most confusing programs in existance.
On the other hand, Macs do this out of the box. Cd recording, movie editing, image editing, and audio all work well and intuitively OUT OF THE BOX.
In windows' defence, I will say that I recently bought a sony PC which had a slew of preinstalled software at no extra price - Premere LE, Sound Forge and ACID, Photoshop LE, and a media player which wasn't as good as iTunes, but definitely beat windows media player. If the normal version of windows did all of this, I'd be happier, but it doesn't, and requires a lot of extra (expensive) software do it. Apple bundles utilities to do all these things INTUITIVELY, and intergrates them well into the OS. If you want something more powerful, go get Final Cut, photoshop, premere, etc. But, for most people, the iApps are fine.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
While I think Windows isn't without it's significant usability flaws, I have to say that I tried KDE 3 seriously for the first time today, and it was an absolute usability nightmare. I have no idea what people are talking about when they say that KDE is kindly-yet-computer-inexperienced-grandmother-frie ndly. I've been using computers seriously for 20 years now, and there were oodles of things that I either couldn't figure out how to do in the hour I used KDE, or that were incredibly unintuitive. I won't even begin to critique the KDE control panel. Talk about a nightmare of ambiguity, poor organization, and far too much complexity.
Not to mention - who thought up that hideous default sound scheme? I know that I'm going to have nightmares about it tonight. My skin was crawling for the few minutes it took me to figure out how to turn it off.
Not that Windows control panels are much better... Windows control panels are also hideously disorganized, with things in completely nonintuitive places (sometimes you have to access the control panel, other times you have to access certain features that you'd logically expect to be in control panels in menus instead, and other times you have to resort to running command line programs to get to windows that provide you with what you're looking for - e.g. ipconfig, msconfig), but I find that the user isn't quite so overwhelmed with options in Windows as they would be in KDE.
Mac OS X is the first operating system where the equivalent of the Control Panel (System Preferences) is logically organized and not overwhelming. I think that software designers should take a usability lesson here.
Listen, Betamax was a better format than VHS, and I knew this. But did I ever go out and buy a Betamax player? No. Why not? Because Blockbuster doesn't carry Beta. Because my friends, my mom, and everyone I know don't have Beta.
Now, I use Linux for my webservers, and it works fine there. Just like I've (okay, my production people have, not me) used betamax for video production in the past. If you need professional grade, and you're not trying to acomodate the end user, these tools are great.
But I *like* being able to go to CompUSA and actually be able to buy a game. Not go to CompUSA, look at a huge shelf of software and hunt for the 5 titles that have a *nix version, out of the 150 titles they have in stock. Hell, the situation is better on the Mac, and it's still not to the point where I'd own a Mac, even though I know that OSX is supperior to windows in many ways.
I honestly think that trying to "win the hearts and minds of joe sixpack" over to *nix is a BAD thing. With windows, we have a standard. I could argue for how great the wierd little wall outlet plugs they have in Europe are, but I'd be a moron to install them in my home if I lived in the USA.
The Atari Jaguar was a much better game system than PS One, but it had crap for software, and not much of it at that. So it died. Should we have pushed for everyone to go buy a Jaguar instead of a Playstation because it was better? Never mind the fact that the games people wanted to play were on playstation. No, this is about good vs evil! We have to figure out a way to prop up Atari!
It's the same thing. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but once something achievs a certain critical mass of market penetration, it becomes a standard. And trying to change these standards to incompatible ones hurts.
Now, the audio market has made a shift several times. Records -> 8 Tracks -> Tapes -> CDs
Video has done this once VHS -> DVD. But with each of these, there was compelling demand for bringing something new to the table. And in each instance, the old format was looking very long in the tooth.
But someone please explain to me why we need to topple windows (Which in my opinion is more mature for the end user than any OS except for OSX) rather than developing it further? Or in this case, being closed source, alowing (and encouraging) Microsoft to take it further? I won't let this become an open source vs closed sourse debate. It's irrelivant. I've never looked at the code of 99% of the open source software I run. And I know that the fact that I've looked at source code at all EVER puts me in a very small minoriity. MY MOM DOES NOT NEED THE SOURCE CODE TO HER SOUND CARD DRIVERS!!! If *you* like to tinker... if *you* like to hack the code, more power to you! But why does this mean that we need to overthrow Microsoft's monopoly, and install one that only a minority want?
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Yes. Are they abusing that? Yes. Should they be punished? Yes.
But itself Windows is not bad. It's a good OS. It is not evil. It is a product. I hate a lot of things Sony does, I hate their stupid useless standards that they try to impose, and I hate how they ran MiniDisc into the ground rather than letting it compete as an open standard against CDs. But I love Trinitrons. And I feel that Sony makes better TVs and Mointors than any others I can afford.
I make a distinction between companies and their products. I buy Sony TVs, Camcorders and DVD players, but I refrain on Playstations (I'm a Nintendo fanboy) and anything involving memory stick. And I write letters to Sony telling them why my money goes to Olympus, rather than getting a shiny new Sony Digital Camera with the Carl Zeiss lense, or why I decided not to opt for the Aiwa stereo and went Pioneer instead, or to Nintendo and Panasonic, urging them to bring the Gamecube/DVD player hybrid goodness that is the Q to the U.S., or to Microsoft urging them to bring features like the ability to keep one user's apps running in the background while another user is logged in and using the computer, which I'm told was just introduced in XP.
Companies listen to users, they want to please their customers, so that they can make more money off of them. I have a brand new copy of XP sitting on my desk waiting to be installed, because I'm hyped about some of the new features it brings to the table over Win2K. Microsoft is pleasing me on the OS front. But I don't use their browser. I use Mozilla. People have every right to freak out when something isn't the way they expect. These hybrid cars from Honda and Toyota are great because they work like cars, not golf carts. You don't have to plug them in. They fuel up at the same fuel station as everyone else. People are used to that. Just like they are used to MS word, and being able to port documents between home and work.
You can name thousand and one reasons why Windows sucks. But I don't see any advantage in throwing it out and improving on *nix to get it up to where Windows is now, rather than improving Windows to make it better.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.