The last beta of Windows Vista I tried, after the installation of the OS alone, took up 16 GB of disk space! I wish I had been offered a few options. If you're talking about, why should someone be asked whether they want notepad.exe installed, then I'm with you-- go ahead and install the thing. If you're just saying you wanted to be able to select a bunch of things and hit a button, and the install take care of the rest, I agree completely. But holy crap, 16 GB is a lot of disk space to have taken up by the "bare" OS install.
Just over a third of the bloggers said they often conduct journalistically appropriate tasks such as verifying facts and linking to source material.
The question that immediately sprung to my mind: what percentage of journalists conduct journalistically appropriate tasks such as verifying facts and linking to source material?
Oh, just lots of things, in Windows in general. This shortcuts on the desktop example is just one example-- I'm not claiming that this alone requires extra helpdesk people, but without any tricks, you either make users admins (which is dumb), or they can't customize their desktop/start menu without a helpdesk guy helping them. Now, of course, you can move things around and fix it (which takes somebody's time to do), and unless you get a good imaging system, you have to do it a LOT to get it working on everyone's desktop. Of course, Windows inability to cope with major hardware changes paired with their anti-piracy stuff makes imaging a big pain in the butt-- as opposed to OSX which can be done oh-so-easily with the command line (and no additional software besides the OS), or with Carbon Copy Cloner (free).
But if you don't handle it properly, you'll get calls that some guy can't remove the "Set up your internet connection" thing in Windows 2000 which is installed in every new user account, and for some reason can't always be removed without an admin account, or you get the opposite problem where some guy deleted a shortcut from his own desktop and doesn't know what to do, or worse yet-- deleted a shortcut from the "All users" desktop, thereby screwing over some other user on that computer.
And best yet, even if you do come up with some solution to all that, it'll be a non-standard hack that will cause problems down the line. Really, that might sound stupid, but I've seen it a lot-- some brilliant tech comes up with a great tweak for group policies or something, Microsoft issues a service pack, some other tech comes in to work on it, and for some reason-- suddenly nothing works.
Sorry, it's probably not a helpful explanation, but let's just say that I've been working in IT for a long time, with various roles, supporting Windows, MacOS (OSX and earlier), and even Linux desktops. Linux requires the most expertise and isn't always a viable solution, MacOS (the old stuff) is just silly, but Windows requires the most work by far. Personally, for ease of administration in a small/medium business, I'd say OSX is the most pleasant by far. Unfortunately, Entourage sucks.
I'm wondering, why are people jumping to these kinds of assumptions? Intel makes its own motherboards, chipsets, graphic chipsets, etc., but that doesn't prevent them from functioning with other manufacturers' parts. What business sense would there be in AMD making their processors incompatible with nVidia chipsets? If either were Microsoft, then maybe they could get away with it, but generally hardware/software benefits from compatibility.
Even if there is some sort of a merger, it's not like that means AMD will make their processors only work with ATi cards, or make ATi cards only work with AMD processors. Well, I guess they could do that, but I'm not sure what the point would be.
I would and so would the courts. You're right that the fundamental complaint is not about bundling two products together, it is about bundling one product with another product when one is a monopoly. Go read up on the economic models of monopolies and antitrust laws to see why this is illegal pretty much everywhere.
Well, certainly far fewer people would complain. My point was, it's not really bundling that's the issue, it's the fact that they are a monopoly who has been caught abusing that monopoly. The complaint Netscape made, for example, wasn't simply that Microsoft shouldn't bundle IE, but that Microsoft was preventing OEMs from bundling Netscape as well, and even that Microsoft had (allegidly) altered Windows to break Netscape a few times. Microsoft also gave users/OEMs no choice in whether they installed IE in the first place, and offered no option to remove it.
It's not as though anybody has complained about bundling Wordpad or Solitaire, or their CLI FTP program, so it's not as though anyone is seriously suggesting that Microsoft be forbidden from "bundling" anything (and only distributing the kernel). The complaints have come only when Microsoft uses these anti-competitive practices that harm the market and consumers.
The problem is, it really doesn't do what I want it to do. I have to use a bunch of hacks to get it to do something remotely close to what I want it to do, when what I precisely want it to do is for it to do what I want easily. That's right, ease is a feature, not just a quality. "Easy administration" for a corporate IT situation isn't the same as some user complaining that they can't figure out how to add an attachment to their e-mail. I'm not talking about "Oh, boo hoo it doesn't have a button, I need to type a command!" I'm talking about, "Crap! I have to hire 2 extra helpdesk guys because Microsoft can't get their shit together!" Their software has lots of options, yes, but it isn't what I'd call flexible.
Competition. Microsoft has been lazy because they dominated the market for so long. If Apple becomes a serious competitor in the business world (where they're just really beginning to scratch the surface) then MS will feel the pinch and be forced to raise the quality of their product.
I think the main question here is, is Microsoft capable of raising the quality of their product? It seems to me they've been trying, and failing.
Besides, I don't see why everyone always paint Microsoft as Apple's big competitor. Apple competes with Dell, Adobe, and Creative more than they compete with Microsoft, since Apple doesn't really make money from seeling individual copies of the OS.
Realism. As Apple becomes more mainstream and falls into the hands of less competent users, we're going to see a lot of the myths about Apple go away.
No argument so far..... I'm thinking all those myths about "You can only do graphic design on Macs," or "Macintoshes are slow" are going fade away.
Its vaunted security comes at the price of ease of use, and I think we'll be seeing a lot of people wondering why they can't do on their Mac what they could do on their Dell...
Huh? I really didn't see that coming. The only thing you can do on a Dell that you can't do on a Mac is run Windows apps... and that's only true until you install Windows on your Macintoshes, and then you can do that too.... So, yeah, I'm not seeing your point, especially when you consider that the hardware of new Macs is pretty similar to that of a new Dell.
Less hypocrisy. Right now I see people on just about every tech site that will tear into Microsoft for packaging a browser with Windows, but praise Apple for packaging an OS with every PC, and dozens of applications with every OS.
That's just an utterly different situation. The complaints about Microsoft aren't simply about bundling. If buying a copy of Windows allowed you to install Office for free, no one would complain. The complaints about Microsoft are because they've been accused of doing things like:
Making it impossible to install the OS without installing bundled software
Making it impossible to remove their bundled software
Punishing OEMs for offering other operating systems
Preventing OEMS from bundling competing products
Purposefully breaking competing software by "patching" windows
Allowing their apps to use undocumented APIs
Breaking interoperability with competing products by "upgrading" formats and protocols
All of that is bad behavior, and but it becomes illegal because Microsoft has such a large market share that simple competition can't prevent that bad behavior.
Apple, on the other hand, only prevents their OS from running on other hardware. That's all they do, and even that is only because they're selling it as a package. It's like Cisco preventing others from ripping their router software out and installing it on other machines. I don't see a serious objection to be made.
You're saying it's moot to complain that they've done something retarded, because if you really want to, you can muck around for a few hours and come up with a solution that may well be equally retarded?
Personally, I'd prefer that things work properly by default.
...but I think that's the problem-- that the only way Microsoft knows how to make something secure is to make it completely unusable. Yes, there are going to be some trade-offs, but they've spent 5 years working on security, supposedly rebuilding the OS from the ground up. You'd think they could come up with a couple clever ways to mitigate that trade-off. Honestly, I have some ideas on this one, and I'm not a software or security guy, and I haven't spent 5 years working on this problem.
That was my thought exactly. Beta testers revealed that the OS behavior was stupid, and sure enough, Microsoft changed the behavior-- to a different stupid behavior.
Seriously, there's just something a little wrong with the way Microsoft handles the "All users" profile. It's a pretty good idea-- to have a place where if you change the settings, it changes for all users. However, it's more complicated of a situation than Microsoft's handling of it implies.
There are your criticisms, and others besides, of Microsofts methods, but I think their solution should entail at least 3 features:
Administrators should be able to create an "All users" profile as default settings.
Individual users should be able to override these settings without changing the "All users" profile
Administrators should be able to block non-admin users from overriding invdividual settings in the profile.
Creating the administrator interface for this behavior might be a bit complicated, but that's how it should work.
Actually, I welcome this. As many people have pointed out in these discussions before, people treat movies and music differently. You watch a movie or TV show once or twice. Maybe you have a favorite that you keep around, watching it a total of 10 times, but that's pretty rare for me.
Therefore, if a company offered legit downloads of movies, giving me this choice:
Movies with absolutely no DRM for $20 a piece -or-
Movies that you only get to watch for 3 days for $2
In that example, I would choose the $2 for 95% of the movies I bought from them. Of course, I'm not sure either of those options are as appealing as the Netflix-ripper model, where $10 a month gives you a DRM-free mpeg4 every couple days, but that isn't entirely legal.
Frankly, I think the last guy is right to ask whether you've ever worked in a support position. Working desktop/network support, it's often your job to help protect users from themselves. That's part of the job description. The point is, you know about computers, encryption, data management, storage, file deletion, etc. You [should] know how that works, and what the associated dangers are, and it's your job to try to protect users from dangers they don't understand.
I find it amusing that Mac OS has had filevault for what, several years now, with no resulting cataclysm. MS introduces it and half the PC IT flip their lids and MS runs scared.
Well, for one thing, OSX allows you to set a master password which will unlock any file vault on the machine. This means that, even if you set up FileVault, the system administrator can still access your vault, which solves both the problem of users losing their passwords, and of system admins wanting to monitor their users. Users can't disable the master password without the admin password.
I'm not sure whether Windows offers such a feature for their encryption.
The reason I support State censorship of all media is the same reason why I support the State in all of its madness: the more they do to harm us, the more the free market will provide means for entrepreneurs to find new ways around the madness.
And here I thought "free market entrepeneurs" bribing public officials was part of the problem with the government. Silly me.
...or you need a 3rd party server to handle the exchange of keys. Yes, some data will need to be exchanged at some point in order to encrypt transmission. However, it would still be possible to make an encryption scheme that:
encrypted mail on the client end.
didn't require manual transmission of keys directly to a client in advance.
didn't require a live client-to-client connection at any point.
and was therefore fairly seamless to the user.
The key here (no pun intended) is that it's possible to have enough information to encrypt a message without having enough information to decrypt that same message. PGP has been operating this way for years, with public keys shared on key servers.
You don't need to manually install the certificate. Your browser will probably warn you that the cert might not be trustworthy, and ask you whether you want to trust it.
There really are two different problems here. The first is encryption, and the second, as you say, is that, "your browser has no way of knowing whether the site is trustworthy". Yes, in either case, there's a requirement that you trade some data with someone at some point. However, it's entirely possible to derive an encyption scheme that would make it difficult for a 3rd party to snoop on your e-mail, but without any ability to verify that the recipient, who you've presumably traded keys with, was the person you meant to trade keys with.
In order to have "trust", just as you said, you need a 3rd party signing authority which you already trust, in order to make sure that the keys in question are valid for the recipient in question. But a lack of that trust doesn't prevent you from running some sort of encryption.
Of course, none of this is without problems. Still, I think I'd rather have something than nothing.
When I connet to an SSL server, do I need to go to a third-party site and download a certificate, manually install it, etc? If I use PGP, the PGP software fetches keys automatically from a key server.
Further, a lot less is needed if you just want to encrypt data, without necessarily verifying the identity of the sender. In my mind, even a very simple encryption without identity verification would be a step in the right direction.
Thanks for not misunderstanding. Like you say, it is kind of "pyramid scheme". There must be a very unique feature in Jabber to convince them to switch.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's something that gets brandished about in lots of OSS discussions, this need for a "killer feature", but I don't think it's really what you need to get people to use F/OSS. Users will choose the software that meets their needs, that's pretty, that's appealing, that's easy to use, has fewer bugs, etc. Killer features help, but it's really about having a solid app with good usability.
Consider the case of Firefox. I don't think that there is any feature in Firefox that was a "killer feature". Pop-up blocking? It existed before Firefox. Extensions? Most users don't use them anyway. So why was Firefox reallly successful?
The first piece of the puzzle was that it did things that people wanted a web browser to do. It did them well, it did them securely, and it did them without any big hassles. Nothing innovative here. Other web browsers did the same things, or some of them did more, but Firefox had fewer headaches.
I have another theory why Firefox was successful, though, which is that it was because it looked like a regular application. Mozilla had this weird/funky skin that really didn't fit in with most linux distros, MacOS, or Windows. It seemed out of place, and people didn't like it because it was jarring. I think Opera still has this problem, in spite of being an excellent free browser.
Also, I think people didn't like having e-mail built into their browser. Whatever the technical reality was, it had the feeling of being excessive. And that was why Firefox was popular. It felt like a small, simple, attractive application that did exactly what you wanted for a specific task, and nothing else. I think that if GAIM was prettier, seemed to fit better with the OS, and didn't expect people to know what GTK was, it might enjoy the same sort of success that Firefox has.
It's not as though you'd necessarily have to fetch that certificate manually, though. You can have the client fetch them automatically upon receipt of a message from a new sender.
There is truth to what you're saying. I don't think I really intended to blame the average Joe, because what he's aware of is a direct result of what someone is trying to sell him. Most of the average Joes running firefox these days, I bet it's because some geek just installed it for them.
Ultimately, I think it's an issue of the chat client. People don't know that when they sign up for their AIM account that they're confining themselves to a proprietary standard. What's probably happened is either:
Someone they know and wanted to talk to uses AIM
That's just the software they've heard about, or the first one that was available.
It might not always be as simple as that, but it's probably pretty close. GAIM also has the unfortunate disadvantage of being ugly, and I think that's why most Mac users I know use Adium, but most Windows users seem to avoid GAIM. Same basic functionality, but Adium is pretty and GAIM isn't. But the client is a serious issue, because lots of the experience of chat is bound to the client, and not the protocol.
So I'm actually a bit hopeful that Jabber will become a more widely used protocol-- by virtue of GoogleTalk. Their client is decent, and they have voice chat.
Anyway, it isn't really because I'm some huge open-source fanatic, or have any huge amount of love for RMS. I just know that, for myself, when some company tries to push me around, treat me badly, or inhibit my ability to do things, I don't usually continue to partonize that company.
I was thinking you'd do it in the mail client. You're right, it's one of those things where, my computer encrypting/decrypting my messages probably won't be that much, but doing thousands of transactions an hour will take its toll.
At least for personal e-mail, client-side encryption shouldn't really be a problem. The problem is, what if you're a company who wants to be able to scan your employees e-mails? Well, yes, that's a problem, but I don't think it's an unsurmountable problem. When you consider the sort of sensitive material that circulates in e-mail these days, it seems like it's worth someone figuring out. Computers keep getting faster, but the e-mail server's job isn't getting much more complicated (at least yet). Sooner or later, maybe we'll just have the CPU cycles to spare.
You are using THEIR servers, and then complain about having to see adverts in your IM client.
It's beyond me why people spend so much time and effort complaining about existing pseudo-free services and backwards engineering them - and don't put the efforts into creating truly OPEN and FREE clients that have the functionality people want, without the worries of x feature not working, or that your client stops working when they decide to shuffle protocol's around.
Um... people have made open, free clients. Jabber. It's good, and it works. The real problem comes when you have to talk to someone who is using AIM, Yahoo, MSN, or whatever, and then you're only using THEIR server to make a connection to someone THEY'VE suckered into watching ads. They really aren't providing any great service, but it's only that your average Joe has heard of AIM, but hasn't heard of Jabber.
Even if it stays behind the Windows curve, it will be one more product nipping at Microsoft's heels.
It's not as thought that curve is very steep. When's the last time a new version of Windows added a feature you've actually used? For me, I think it was Windows 2000, and that feature was "not built on DOS".
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The last beta of Windows Vista I tried, after the installation of the OS alone, took up 16 GB of disk space! I wish I had been offered a few options. If you're talking about, why should someone be asked whether they want notepad.exe installed, then I'm with you-- go ahead and install the thing. If you're just saying you wanted to be able to select a bunch of things and hit a button, and the install take care of the rest, I agree completely. But holy crap, 16 GB is a lot of disk space to have taken up by the "bare" OS install.
The question that immediately sprung to my mind: what percentage of journalists conduct journalistically appropriate tasks such as verifying facts and linking to source material?
But if you don't handle it properly, you'll get calls that some guy can't remove the "Set up your internet connection" thing in Windows 2000 which is installed in every new user account, and for some reason can't always be removed without an admin account, or you get the opposite problem where some guy deleted a shortcut from his own desktop and doesn't know what to do, or worse yet-- deleted a shortcut from the "All users" desktop, thereby screwing over some other user on that computer.
And best yet, even if you do come up with some solution to all that, it'll be a non-standard hack that will cause problems down the line. Really, that might sound stupid, but I've seen it a lot-- some brilliant tech comes up with a great tweak for group policies or something, Microsoft issues a service pack, some other tech comes in to work on it, and for some reason-- suddenly nothing works.
Sorry, it's probably not a helpful explanation, but let's just say that I've been working in IT for a long time, with various roles, supporting Windows, MacOS (OSX and earlier), and even Linux desktops. Linux requires the most expertise and isn't always a viable solution, MacOS (the old stuff) is just silly, but Windows requires the most work by far. Personally, for ease of administration in a small/medium business, I'd say OSX is the most pleasant by far. Unfortunately, Entourage sucks.
I'm wondering, why are people jumping to these kinds of assumptions? Intel makes its own motherboards, chipsets, graphic chipsets, etc., but that doesn't prevent them from functioning with other manufacturers' parts. What business sense would there be in AMD making their processors incompatible with nVidia chipsets? If either were Microsoft, then maybe they could get away with it, but generally hardware/software benefits from compatibility.
Even if there is some sort of a merger, it's not like that means AMD will make their processors only work with ATi cards, or make ATi cards only work with AMD processors. Well, I guess they could do that, but I'm not sure what the point would be.
I would and so would the courts. You're right that the fundamental complaint is not about bundling two products together, it is about bundling one product with another product when one is a monopoly. Go read up on the economic models of monopolies and antitrust laws to see why this is illegal pretty much everywhere.
Well, certainly far fewer people would complain. My point was, it's not really bundling that's the issue, it's the fact that they are a monopoly who has been caught abusing that monopoly. The complaint Netscape made, for example, wasn't simply that Microsoft shouldn't bundle IE, but that Microsoft was preventing OEMs from bundling Netscape as well, and even that Microsoft had (allegidly) altered Windows to break Netscape a few times. Microsoft also gave users/OEMs no choice in whether they installed IE in the first place, and offered no option to remove it.
It's not as though anybody has complained about bundling Wordpad or Solitaire, or their CLI FTP program, so it's not as though anyone is seriously suggesting that Microsoft be forbidden from "bundling" anything (and only distributing the kernel). The complaints have come only when Microsoft uses these anti-competitive practices that harm the market and consumers.
The problem is, it really doesn't do what I want it to do. I have to use a bunch of hacks to get it to do something remotely close to what I want it to do, when what I precisely want it to do is for it to do what I want easily. That's right, ease is a feature, not just a quality. "Easy administration" for a corporate IT situation isn't the same as some user complaining that they can't figure out how to add an attachment to their e-mail. I'm not talking about "Oh, boo hoo it doesn't have a button, I need to type a command!" I'm talking about, "Crap! I have to hire 2 extra helpdesk guys because Microsoft can't get their shit together!" Their software has lots of options, yes, but it isn't what I'd call flexible.
Competition. Microsoft has been lazy because they dominated the market for so long. If Apple becomes a serious competitor in the business world (where they're just really beginning to scratch the surface) then MS will feel the pinch and be forced to raise the quality of their product.
I think the main question here is, is Microsoft capable of raising the quality of their product? It seems to me they've been trying, and failing.
Besides, I don't see why everyone always paint Microsoft as Apple's big competitor. Apple competes with Dell, Adobe, and Creative more than they compete with Microsoft, since Apple doesn't really make money from seeling individual copies of the OS.
Realism. As Apple becomes more mainstream and falls into the hands of less competent users, we're going to see a lot of the myths about Apple go away.
No argument so far..... I'm thinking all those myths about "You can only do graphic design on Macs," or "Macintoshes are slow" are going fade away.
Its vaunted security comes at the price of ease of use, and I think we'll be seeing a lot of people wondering why they can't do on their Mac what they could do on their Dell...
Huh? I really didn't see that coming. The only thing you can do on a Dell that you can't do on a Mac is run Windows apps... and that's only true until you install Windows on your Macintoshes, and then you can do that too.... So, yeah, I'm not seeing your point, especially when you consider that the hardware of new Macs is pretty similar to that of a new Dell.
Less hypocrisy. Right now I see people on just about every tech site that will tear into Microsoft for packaging a browser with Windows, but praise Apple for packaging an OS with every PC, and dozens of applications with every OS.
That's just an utterly different situation. The complaints about Microsoft aren't simply about bundling. If buying a copy of Windows allowed you to install Office for free, no one would complain. The complaints about Microsoft are because they've been accused of doing things like:
All of that is bad behavior, and but it becomes illegal because Microsoft has such a large market share that simple competition can't prevent that bad behavior.
Apple, on the other hand, only prevents their OS from running on other hardware. That's all they do, and even that is only because they're selling it as a package. It's like Cisco preventing others from ripping their router software out and installing it on other machines. I don't see a serious objection to be made.
You're saying it's moot to complain that they've done something retarded, because if you really want to, you can muck around for a few hours and come up with a solution that may well be equally retarded?
Personally, I'd prefer that things work properly by default.
...but I think that's the problem-- that the only way Microsoft knows how to make something secure is to make it completely unusable. Yes, there are going to be some trade-offs, but they've spent 5 years working on security, supposedly rebuilding the OS from the ground up. You'd think they could come up with a couple clever ways to mitigate that trade-off. Honestly, I have some ideas on this one, and I'm not a software or security guy, and I haven't spent 5 years working on this problem.
"Default user" doesn't really do the job. If I make a change to "default user", it doesn't make that change to existing accounts.
That was my thought exactly. Beta testers revealed that the OS behavior was stupid, and sure enough, Microsoft changed the behavior-- to a different stupid behavior.
Seriously, there's just something a little wrong with the way Microsoft handles the "All users" profile. It's a pretty good idea-- to have a place where if you change the settings, it changes for all users. However, it's more complicated of a situation than Microsoft's handling of it implies.
There are your criticisms, and others besides, of Microsofts methods, but I think their solution should entail at least 3 features:
Creating the administrator interface for this behavior might be a bit complicated, but that's how it should work.
Actually, I welcome this. As many people have pointed out in these discussions before, people treat movies and music differently. You watch a movie or TV show once or twice. Maybe you have a favorite that you keep around, watching it a total of 10 times, but that's pretty rare for me.
Therefore, if a company offered legit downloads of movies, giving me this choice:
In that example, I would choose the $2 for 95% of the movies I bought from them. Of course, I'm not sure either of those options are as appealing as the Netflix-ripper model, where $10 a month gives you a DRM-free mpeg4 every couple days, but that isn't entirely legal.
Frankly, I think the last guy is right to ask whether you've ever worked in a support position. Working desktop/network support, it's often your job to help protect users from themselves. That's part of the job description. The point is, you know about computers, encryption, data management, storage, file deletion, etc. You [should] know how that works, and what the associated dangers are, and it's your job to try to protect users from dangers they don't understand.
I find it amusing that Mac OS has had filevault for what, several years now, with no resulting cataclysm. MS introduces it and half the PC IT flip their lids and MS runs scared.
Well, for one thing, OSX allows you to set a master password which will unlock any file vault on the machine. This means that, even if you set up FileVault, the system administrator can still access your vault, which solves both the problem of users losing their passwords, and of system admins wanting to monitor their users. Users can't disable the master password without the admin password.
I'm not sure whether Windows offers such a feature for their encryption.
And here I thought "free market entrepeneurs" bribing public officials was part of the problem with the government. Silly me.
The key here (no pun intended) is that it's possible to have enough information to encrypt a message without having enough information to decrypt that same message. PGP has been operating this way for years, with public keys shared on key servers.
You don't need to manually install the certificate. Your browser will probably warn you that the cert might not be trustworthy, and ask you whether you want to trust it.
There really are two different problems here. The first is encryption, and the second, as you say, is that, "your browser has no way of knowing whether the site is trustworthy". Yes, in either case, there's a requirement that you trade some data with someone at some point. However, it's entirely possible to derive an encyption scheme that would make it difficult for a 3rd party to snoop on your e-mail, but without any ability to verify that the recipient, who you've presumably traded keys with, was the person you meant to trade keys with.
In order to have "trust", just as you said, you need a 3rd party signing authority which you already trust, in order to make sure that the keys in question are valid for the recipient in question. But a lack of that trust doesn't prevent you from running some sort of encryption.
Of course, none of this is without problems. Still, I think I'd rather have something than nothing.
Further, a lot less is needed if you just want to encrypt data, without necessarily verifying the identity of the sender. In my mind, even a very simple encryption without identity verification would be a step in the right direction.
Thanks for not misunderstanding. Like you say, it is kind of "pyramid scheme". There must be a very unique feature in Jabber to convince them to switch.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's something that gets brandished about in lots of OSS discussions, this need for a "killer feature", but I don't think it's really what you need to get people to use F/OSS. Users will choose the software that meets their needs, that's pretty, that's appealing, that's easy to use, has fewer bugs, etc. Killer features help, but it's really about having a solid app with good usability.
Consider the case of Firefox. I don't think that there is any feature in Firefox that was a "killer feature". Pop-up blocking? It existed before Firefox. Extensions? Most users don't use them anyway. So why was Firefox reallly successful?
The first piece of the puzzle was that it did things that people wanted a web browser to do. It did them well, it did them securely, and it did them without any big hassles. Nothing innovative here. Other web browsers did the same things, or some of them did more, but Firefox had fewer headaches.
I have another theory why Firefox was successful, though, which is that it was because it looked like a regular application. Mozilla had this weird/funky skin that really didn't fit in with most linux distros, MacOS, or Windows. It seemed out of place, and people didn't like it because it was jarring. I think Opera still has this problem, in spite of being an excellent free browser.
Also, I think people didn't like having e-mail built into their browser. Whatever the technical reality was, it had the feeling of being excessive. And that was why Firefox was popular. It felt like a small, simple, attractive application that did exactly what you wanted for a specific task, and nothing else. I think that if GAIM was prettier, seemed to fit better with the OS, and didn't expect people to know what GTK was, it might enjoy the same sort of success that Firefox has.
It's not as though you'd necessarily have to fetch that certificate manually, though. You can have the client fetch them automatically upon receipt of a message from a new sender.
There is truth to what you're saying. I don't think I really intended to blame the average Joe, because what he's aware of is a direct result of what someone is trying to sell him. Most of the average Joes running firefox these days, I bet it's because some geek just installed it for them.
Ultimately, I think it's an issue of the chat client. People don't know that when they sign up for their AIM account that they're confining themselves to a proprietary standard. What's probably happened is either:
It might not always be as simple as that, but it's probably pretty close. GAIM also has the unfortunate disadvantage of being ugly, and I think that's why most Mac users I know use Adium, but most Windows users seem to avoid GAIM. Same basic functionality, but Adium is pretty and GAIM isn't. But the client is a serious issue, because lots of the experience of chat is bound to the client, and not the protocol.
So I'm actually a bit hopeful that Jabber will become a more widely used protocol-- by virtue of GoogleTalk. Their client is decent, and they have voice chat.
Anyway, it isn't really because I'm some huge open-source fanatic, or have any huge amount of love for RMS. I just know that, for myself, when some company tries to push me around, treat me badly, or inhibit my ability to do things, I don't usually continue to partonize that company.
At least for personal e-mail, client-side encryption shouldn't really be a problem. The problem is, what if you're a company who wants to be able to scan your employees e-mails? Well, yes, that's a problem, but I don't think it's an unsurmountable problem. When you consider the sort of sensitive material that circulates in e-mail these days, it seems like it's worth someone figuring out. Computers keep getting faster, but the e-mail server's job isn't getting much more complicated (at least yet). Sooner or later, maybe we'll just have the CPU cycles to spare.
You are using THEIR servers, and then complain about having to see adverts in your IM client.
It's beyond me why people spend so much time and effort complaining about existing pseudo-free services and backwards engineering them - and don't put the efforts into creating truly OPEN and FREE clients that have the functionality people want, without the worries of x feature not working, or that your client stops working when they decide to shuffle protocol's around.
Um... people have made open, free clients. Jabber. It's good, and it works. The real problem comes when you have to talk to someone who is using AIM, Yahoo, MSN, or whatever, and then you're only using THEIR server to make a connection to someone THEY'VE suckered into watching ads. They really aren't providing any great service, but it's only that your average Joe has heard of AIM, but hasn't heard of Jabber.
Even if it stays behind the Windows curve, it will be one more product nipping at Microsoft's heels.
It's not as thought that curve is very steep. When's the last time a new version of Windows added a feature you've actually used? For me, I think it was Windows 2000, and that feature was "not built on DOS".