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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
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.
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.
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