Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Plays Linux Games at Work
When I called him back, he thanked me for my quick response and said that he was new to Linux and wasn't sure if he'd installed the game right. He then said, "This machine is going to used for... well, I'm a Microsoft employee and my group is doing a usability study on Linux."
As it turned out, he had unpacked the tarball (I had to explain what a tarball was) on the CD by double-clicking its package icon in gmc and then double-clicking the install icon that came up. He had absolutely no idea where the game had been installed, and didn't know how to search for it.
At this point I pointed out to him that CivCTP came with a graphical install script, conveniently labeled "install" and placed in the same directory as the tarball. And in fact, in that same directory was a text file labeled "README" that explained how to run the install program.
I had him pull up a terminal window and run `sh install` (since he had a 4.5 GB drive containing only a fresh install of RH6, he wasn't too concerned with finding his previous installation just yet), and as the graphical install smoothly copied the files into their proper place, we chatted amiably.
Me: "So what kind of system are you using for this?"
Him: "It's a... [pause to read label on the case] HP Vectra."
Me: "Umm, what processor does it use?"
Him: "It's a Pentium III, uh... 450 MHz?"
Me: "Yes, PIIIs do come in 450 MHz."
Eventually, the installation finished. I encouraged him to grab the patch from our website, and he thanked me and hung up.
Ordinarily, I am very respectful to newbies. I don't even laugh at them behind their backs--especially if they have been looking through man pages and reference books trying to figure things out. This time I almost peed my pants.
Then the big question dawned on me:
What does it mean when Big Bill gives brand new P-III 450's running Linux to game-playing newbies who don't read reference books, manuals, How-To's or README's for a usability study?
Can you say "viable desktop environment?"
Note from RM: Yes, we verified the story. All parties are real.
I used work as a contractor on the microsoft campus in redmond. There are a lot of linux boxen there. The interesting thing is that almost all of them are on the desks of contractors. The deal is that those who are depending on MS stock for their retirement refuse to even think about linux, but a lot of the contractors out there are hedging their bets. There were (best guess) around 12 linux boxen in MS building 11 alone. Which is a lot considering the location.
--Shoeboy
As charming and witty as those first couple of posts are, this is a BIG deal. (Okay, everyone else will say this, too.)
:) (While "tarball" is a great term for geeks to use, it certainly isn't an intuitive word. For that matter, neither are many of the other things unixfolk take for granted. "grep" comes to mind real quick.)
While all the gnome, redhat, etc people involved can pat themselves on the back, this does point out some things that are really small that *NEED* to be done... off the top of my head I can think of:
1. Autorun.
2. a dummy-fied RPM/DEB/any other kind of package installer/viewer/uninstaller that can be used cross-distribution and cross-version with similar functionality to the dreaded "add/remove programs" control panel
3. less jargon.
We're getting there. While things may be in a state now where linux+gnome/kde+icewm/enlightenemnt/* may be "mom friendly". It's certainly not friendly to someone who's going to be installing hundreds of programs cluelessly every day -- like your average computer using teenager.
-Chris
In fact, who do you think MS would hire to study Linux?
Developers? No way! Once they got a hold of Linux they'd never go back to Windows.
Marketing types? Would you even try to sell Windows after using Linux?
Sales? See marketing.
FUD slingers? Nope. They couldn't even do their job anymore.
So who else do you hire other than someone expendable? Someone with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever? They'll probably poke his eyes out and sew his mouth shut after they're done with him.
Id say: Leave a clueless user (tm) who has no idea about this whole computing thingie and whos not even willing to read any sort of documentation alone with a blank harddisk and a W98 install CD and guess what he will achieve? Yeah nothing. Right.
Windows has nothing to do with intuition, its only got to do with being used to it since years. Anyone whos grown up on Linux, will consider this an "intuitive" install:
$ tar zxvf tarball.tar.gz ./configure
$ cd tarball
$
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
Get the point?
-martin
It seems to me that the guy from Microsoft could have just as well been testing various support departments to see how much support you could get.
He may have been clueless or he may have just been acting that way.
Many people would just put the cd in the drive and *expect* an auto-install to start. If nothing happens, then they'll double click on some likely looking filenames in gmc/whatever.
Game installation now is a complete no-brainer compared to the bad old days when you had to run install programs from dos, make custom boot disks, maybe find a working video driver, yadda, yadda.
Win9[58] as a gaming environment is pretty good - most of the time you don't have to worry about stuff.
As for the 'newbie' not knowing what his pc is: chances are he was given a blank pc and a stack of CDs and told to install them and see how easy it is and if the platform is sensible for a *real* newbie, i.e. the 'foot pedal, cup-holder and monitor-stand' brigade.
dave
I know the instinct is to jump on the anti-FUD ramparts as soon as reports like this come out.
But take a deep breath. Microsoft is in the operating system business. I'm sure they've got legions of people doing "usablity studies" on MacOS 9, BeOS, OS/2 5, Solaris 7 and so on. Eventually reports get written, MS finds a few new features to steal, some contractors get easy money and everyone is happy.
Also, don't forget these guys are paranoid as hell. Why should they believe either Linus or the trade press when they say "Linux is not ready for the desktop", when they can afford their own usablity lab to make that determination for them.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
FUD? Rigging results? Please. Microsoft may make common practice of that, but that is NOT what's going on here.
./configure, make, make install)? Or are things as easy as clicking a single icon? Do you have to run applications within a terminal, calling them up by exact capitalization, or do you get a big friendly icon automatically? When something goes wrong, how easy is it to fix? How easy is it to get help? This is useable to people who don't already know all the proper commands, aka. born-and-bred Windows users who might want to stop using Windows for some reason. Microsoft wants to know "how easy is it to switch"? Do they have to worry?
...] or tr" when you type "help" is immediately useable?) Is the "/usr/bin" directory the first, most obvious place to look for a new game you just installed?
According to the fellow in question, they were performing a "useability" study. That means just that: useability. How easy is Linux for people who are not already accustomed to it to use?
So, why are they having people do studies on Linux? It's competition, and anyone who wants to compete will take a gander at the competition.
Why are they using "newbies"? Think about this. What good would it be to do a "useability" study on WordPerfect 3.1 using people who have already memorized all the fkey combos, or who know to look for fkey combos? NONE! Why? These people have already adjusted to the environment, and so any reports they have on how "useable" that environment are are SKEWED. People who don't know to read the manual, and don't know much about linux (or even computers, for that matter) are PERFECT for a true "usability" study. They allow a clearer look at how obvious and easy it is to do what you want to do. The question of useability attempts to answer the question: what do I have to learn in order to use this? Do you have to learn to install software in at least 5-6 steps (gunzip, untar, cd,
In this case, the answer is a resounding NO. Linux is complicated. Many if not most applications are distributed primarily in source-code format, which requires compiling, which requires installation of all the development libraries and toolkits, which requires keeping up with the most recent versions of these same libraries, which involves visiting ftp sites, which involves knowing about ftp-commands....and if not that, it requires discovery of rpm and it's man page, which requires discovery of man pages (not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when presented with a command prompt for most people), or it requires the discovery of gnorpm (not advertized as much as it is), which requires knowing why you need to be root for some things, but don't want to be for most things. Even just typing "help" provides you with a bewildering list of commands and a fairly cryptic set of symbols describing their use - BUT NOT WHAT THEY DO! (please, is anyone so deluded as to argue that any os that provides "trap [arg] [signal_spec
Suffice to say, to use Linux pretty much at all, you need to know A LOT about how it works, how computers work, how unixes work - some mixture thereof - to get ANYWHERE.
And why would they want to find out how "useable" Linux is from someone who already knows all about how to use and configure it? They don't. Because that information would be WRONG. At least, it would be in all areas that they care about.
Yes, it's funny. No, I don't know why. But it's newbies because that's the only kind of "useable" that counts for the mass market. "Useable" means "really fricking obvious" in the mass market. What's obvious to you and me is quite often nowhere near obvious to anyone else. Microsoft may be all about FUD, but that's not what it's doing here...at least, not yet.
As an ex-Microsoftie, this quote hit me differently.
Then the big question dawned on me: What does it mean when Big Bill gives brand new P-III 450's running Linux to game-playing newbies who don't read reference books, manuals, How-To's or README's for a usability study? Can you say "viable desktop environment?"
So, Microsoft's been touted for years for hiring smart cookies. Even with the degradation of its standards and practices, and the complacency of being the largest corporation with an enviable bottom line, it's not easy to walk in and get a Microsoft job.
I still expect that the guy who called up wasn't an idiot. Sure, hadn't yet looked at the machine that Bill bought him, sure, hadn't used Linux before very much. Isn't that the perfect useability test case ? And given that... how did Linux perform? The out-of-box experience seems to have failed.
I was on the team when Windows 95 was still called Windows 93, before it even grew the codename Chicago. At that time, the general manager of the desktop Windows Business Unit, Brad Silverberg, coined a mantra of the ideal in useability. He said that his [nontechnical] mother should be able to use Windows. Personally, I think we failed at reaching that ideal, but we made the right evolutionary step from Windows 3.1.
Now, how well can your mom use Linux?
[
It's exactly what I would do if I were them and it has nothing to do with FUD. Indeed: "a clueless newbie is the typical Microsoft customer". From MICROS~1's point of view that's just a fact. Their $$ spends just as well as that of a "guru" customer. What do you think they are going to do?
In this one example they seem to be looking at
games. A game that can't be installed easily by a 10 year old with 6 months experience pointing and clicking on things is not a market threat to them. That's all they care about. The fact that it's "obvious" to you or me or anyone else how to install it does not matter. That's not the target market.
Put it this way: Have you ever been asked to do QA on or write docs for code that you've written? For real end users I mean here, not man pages or READMEs or comments in the Makefile. I have and I've seen the results of these attempts many times. IT DOES NOT WORK. you are too close to it. You don't know to explain the parts that the end user will find confusing because it's not confusing to you. You don't know to test a part of the program in a way you didn't think of because... well you didn't think of it.
Same goes for usability. You bring in the intelligent but ignorant. If they can't make it work it doesn't work - because they are the customers. After your ignorant pawn has done this
for a while they lose their usefullness because they also know it too well and are too close to it. And LO! a tech support rep is created! Been there, done that. Eventually the smart ones understand it too well and become terrible tech support reps because they can't explain it to the end user in tiny words that they understand.
MICROS~1, and any other company that actually delivers products to "normal people", understands this early on or they go out of business. This is often a blind spot for OSS advocates but ICROS~1 has always understood it quite well. Technology, Quality, Stability - these may be their blind spot but this isn't.
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
If there was one thing I could tell MS for their feasibility studies:
/sbin/lilo -U before you replace one linux distribution with another. It helps get rid of the LI... freeze in your MBR.
... or even at 4.0.
Use tcp_wrappers. The security benefits of tcp_wrappers have been proven by Wietse Venema; the rest comes only from my own meandering experience.
Run
If you're going to be paranoid and deny telnet and ftp in favor of SSH, don't send your mail passwords plaintext with POP3.
Maybe Linux will take over the desktop, maybe it won't. Maybe InstallShield for tarballs will be created; maybe it won't. Either way, your Mindcraft scores are half chance -- and so are everyone else's.
Be kind to your root partition. You'll miss it when it's gone.
If you don't know which direction your favorite window manager will go, don't worry. A lot of the greatest programmers I know had no idea what they were doing at version 2.2
Each day, activate a compiler flag that warns you.
Do not read Slate Magazine -- It will only make you feel ugly.
Accept certain truths as inevitable: USB support is dodgy, "stable" kernels will crash, and you too will lose your CHANGELOG -- at which point you will fantasize that when you were at version 2.2.x, USB suited your purposes, kernels never crashed, and people read their source code.
Read your source code. Source code is a form of nostalgia... it lets you pick it up, parse through the comments, and audit it to make better code in the future.
But trust me on the tcp_wrappers.
/* thanks to Baz Luhrmann */
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I have Civ:CTP. I like it, I liked it's install. However, it wasn't perfect (from my ever-ongoing useablility test mindset :-)* ).
/opt, Mandrake installs it in, well, everywhere, etc).
./configure && make && make install is nice and quick, and works quite well on different distribs, but get a new user to install GNOME or KDE from sources and watch them cry.
The newbie doesn't understand mounting. That's step one. You can't even *read* the README on the CD until you do that. When you explain mounting, they usually say something like, "that's pretty stupid."
But that's not so much of a problem. The biggest problem, as I see it is the variable filesystem structure among distributions. There's tons of work being done on useability, etc, but it is pretty much in the context of one distribution at a time (SuSE installs KDE in
What is needed is an agreement on a filesystem structure, first and foremost. There was work being done on that, but where is it now??
How come I haven't heard a thing about it in *months*? I've heard so much news about new releases of XX distrib, XX desktop, etc. LSB? nothing.
I think that the importance of GUI install work should be downgraded to make room for this. When a developer can release a package and not have to supply different binaries for different distributions, we'll all be happier.
Ok, for small packages,
The worst thing is that this is an aspect of open-source that "low-ranking" people like me and many others cannot really make an impact in. This has to be done by Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Corel, among others.
My father has spent some 20 years working with computers, most of them in a DOS environment. Recently he had to adapt to win95 and I was trying to teach him the basics. Now my father can issue 'arcane' commands like copy and mkdir and fdisk, and he has even mastered wildcards and such. He can program, and he can compile his own programs. Yet, it took him some thirty minutes to grasp the idea that "when I drag a file on another directory, the file is not moved, not copied, instead just a shortcut is created" After some frustration, he realized it'd be quicker to do it through the prompt, and he never used windows eplorer again since. Then I had to explain about shortcuts on the menus and desktop.. which eventually led to the question "can't I just add the damn directory to the $PATH??" Great fun!
Intuitive interface is an interface that provides you with an easy-to-grasp expectation as to what will happen when you do some action, and that fullfils that expectation. Well, I never really understood how that applies to Microsoft's interface. It harldy ever manages to do what I expect to happen.
It is natural with users of an interface to get comfortable with it over time. But intuitiveness does not refer to that. It refers to making users comfortable with the interface without prior experience and habitual familiarity with it.
Nick Moraitakis
-- say with me: i'm a monkey child
Please join me in boycotting Loki. I'm not about to trust these clowns with a tech support call, much less my credit card number.
Um, this wasn't exactly a Loki press release. This was an individual employee, not speaking for the company, who I doubt even asked his supervisor if he could spread the story.
A few people here scream "boycott!" at the drop of a hat (which is often red, incidentally).
It doesn't solve anything.
You boycott a company that hires child/slave labour in foreign countries. You boycott companies that destroy the environment or personal freedoms. You don't boycott trivial stuff like this. Few people will listen to you.
Instead, a linux company does the same thing and suddenly it's "Microsoft is hiring idiots and trying to spread FUD, blah blah blah".
Actually, most of the talk on this story is about useability issues with Linux. To top it all off, I see lots of agreement that Linux does lack useability in many areas.
They didn't breach confidentially by paraphrasing what the caller said. Squistle (the author of the letter) didn't give the callers name or location, only the fact that the caller was a male and that he worked for Microsoft.
Like hell, they didn't. They said that he was a male Microsoft employee that worked on a project which was evaluating Linux. He had a 450MHz PIII with a Loki game installed on it. Believe me, he would not be that hard to track down.
Since this was never a "real" tech support call, is any "real" privacy being violated?
Uhm, it looked pretty damn "real" to me. What, are you saying that this tech just made up this story?
Are you also going to boycott all Microsoft products because they are trying to fake a study on Linux usability?
Who said anything about faking a story on Linux usability? Corporations test out competitors' products all the time, to help them improve their own products. The only thing we know about this was that this was a usability test. Anything beyond that is pure speculation.
You're scaring me a little here guys. This is going to be a cold shower for some of you.
This is NOT a competition against Microsoft. Don't use Linux as your private banner for campaign against Microsoft - or any other competitor. Those of you who do are working directly against Linux. I refer you to the crusades, the spanish inquisition. Both done in the name of Christianity. Both waged against an enemy that any convert could see was evil.
Microsoft is big enough that if the Linux following tries to make sure Microsoft can never out do Linux *by observing* Microsoft at the microscopic level, then Linux will turn into a Windows parasite.
I would suggest that Netscape's biggest undoing came not from Microsoft, but from Netscape. They got too obsessed with 'beating down Microsoft', and less and less focused on 'making a better Netscape'.
By Netscape 4.5, Microsoft didn't really have much to compete with.
I realise people are going to jump up here and tell me how the court case helped thus and something else did that.
But do we have a great web-browser? No.
Microsoft play a game, a competition. Linux has no need to enter the bullring. Remember what makes Linux what it is is people developing Linux for users, developing Linux for sys admins, developing Linux for deployment. Don't turn this into Linux development for comparison charts.
Oliver
-- A change is as good as a reboot.