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This has (some) echoes of the rise and fall of the use of Linux at Central Scotland Police: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/ms_lochs_down_police/ https

This has (some) echoes of the rise and fall of the use of Linux at Central Scotland Police: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/ms_lochs_down_police/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/ms_lochs_down_polic... I worked with one of the architects of that (many moons ago). He was a fervent believer in OSS and its use in the enterprise. From what I could glean, they struggled with user interface issues - end users didn't like having to relearn how to use their very-similar-but-not-quite-the-same-word-processor software. As soon as he left (and it was never clear which came first) they decided to return to the Microsoft fold. edit: better article link

danieldk 9y ago
From what I could glean, they struggled with user interface issues - end users didn't like having to relearn how to use their very-similar-but-not-quite-the-same-word-processor software. I find this very interesting. We are all familiar with less tech-savvy users that are only comfortable what they know. However, Google Docs is a fierce competitor of Microsoft Office. Android/iOS replaced Windows for a lot of regular users. Chrome crushed the competition, including Internet Explorer. Why are these examples different? Is it because these alternatives did not try to emulate Microsoft's products and hence didn't cause the impression that 'it's almost the same, but glitchy'. Or was the experience of these products so much better than Microsoft's counterparts? What lesson could the FLOSS world learn here?
- extrapickles 9y ago
  If you collaboratively produce documents at your workplace, Google Docs wins by a large margin. Microsoft products have way too many issues when multiple people are editing the same large (100-200 page) document. Edit: The takeaway for FOSS is that the product has to be lower frustration than the alternative for it to win out.
  - iaonsdionio 9y ago
    That sounds like a nightmare. Google Docs is barely powerful enough for writing a three-page letter. I can't imagine writing a collaborative 200-page document with it. LaTeX + git would be the ideal, but my coworkers would shoot me for suggesting it.
    - watwut 9y ago
      You would spend half of time solving merge conflicts and dealing with compile errors after bad merge constantly.
      - paulmd 9y ago
        Divide your document into chapters, have one tex file per chapter, plus a driver file that runs the whole document (by \include'ing the individual chapter files).
        pjmlp 9y ago
        Now try to explain that to the secretary that sends PowerPoint files with Word and Excel documents embedded in them.
        extrapickles 9y ago
        Exactly. I shudder at the thought of training a office manager to use latex or git. Open source has all the technical pieces to do a good job of the issue, but they rarely are seamlessly integrated into a program that someone can be highly successful just by clicking on things that look like what they want.
      - OxO4 9y ago
        Not at all. If you do basic coordination of who is editing which section when, merge conflicts are exceedingly rare. I've collaborated on multiple 10-ish page documents (research papers) with 3+ people using LaTeX+git and it has worked just fine.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Spend money to get your system into schools, because a huge proportion of workers will adamantly HATE anybody who tries to make them learn something new after their first few years working. Apple figured it out. Microsoft figured it out. Google is figuring it out. GNU hasn't quite gotten there.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    No, what workers hate is when they have to learn something new for no reason. If you give them something new that actually improves their lives, makes it easier for them to do their jobs, they'll embrace it (usually). That doesn't happen often, because employers and decision makers rarely look at things from the perspective of the employee, preferring instead to make their own jobs easier at the expense of others.
    - leggomylibro 9y ago
      That's a good point, although when you maliciously box out competitors from being easily compatible with your product once your audience is locked in... Well, it starts to smell like antitrust behavior, honestly. These changes WOULD make peoples' lives better and easier, if they were allowed to be compatible with the products those people were previously using. To prevent that, incumbents do everything possible to stop any new/different systems from interacting with the ones that they sell. And the whole point is that that would not be an issue if people were willing to hold their noses for a damned second and migrate to systems that ARE accessible and open and easy to use with various products from a plethora of different vendors. That way, the barrier of 'pointlessly changing things' will be vastly reduced in the future. You say the managers are short-sighted and lazy, but so are the workers. It's only human.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
        Of course. We are familiar with the concept that, in general, people will act in their own short term self interest. An open, compatible computing world sounds great to you and me because we are computer people with heavy investment in the future of computing. This is not the case for most workers or their managers and executives.
- watwut 9y ago
  Being comfortable with what you know is one thing. The other one is that "they are just unwilling to learn something different" is comfortable narrative if you are advocate, but oftentimes too much of a simplification. At least based on what I observed when geeks interacted with users. Google Docs, Adroid and iOS for that matter worked hard on making everything intuitive for average person. They are easy to start with. They are less frustrating for use case they are meant for then Microsoft products. Otherwise said, someone with influence and power in team who made sure users needs were cared about in gazimillion of small details. And they look good. Many geeks are quick to write off users and assume they are dumb instead of trying to understand what those people do or need. As far as geek is concerned, the user is doing some stupid generic thing in word processor. If something does not work, it is unimportant edge case that user should not care about - because geek dont need it. People who say that it is all about users being lazy generally never valued what those users do and dont consider half their needs to be legitimate. I mean, people were "just not willing to learn something new" for not jumping to open office from Excel, but I swear to got that excel was both faster/responsive and easier to use at that time and open office really missed features that people I knew actually used. Very-similar-but-not-quite-the-same-word-processor software may mean that report you used to generate within an hour suddenly takes three and still does not look good enough. Clunky may mean twice as much clicking for often performed tasks. If may mean that often used features are awfully complicated or hidden from sight. Or that it is generally slower in things that are visible while fast in things that dont matter. You cant just write that off as lazy or stupid users to their face and cant just get offended and then get aggressive when they talk about their frustrations (which is what I have seen geeks to do).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- _tulpa 9y ago
  > Why are these examples different? Chrome was so much better than IE or firefox when it came out. Android/iOS replacing windows is because before that windows was the only option, then something came along that better suited their needs and they rolled with it. Libreoffice on the other hand is a clusterfuck of awkward, clunky, unintuitive, and dated UI design. It's not even comparable to MS Office or Google Docs in terms of usability, and that's before you add the extra layer of unfamiliarity. And now google docs doesn't cost money so why would you bother using Libreoffice unless you were forced to?
  - dec0dedab0de 9y ago
    Chrome was so much better than IE or firefox when it came out. While I never saw chrome as better than Firefox, thats just a matter of taste. I dont think the average user's sense of quality had anything to do with its rise. It was a very heavy marketing campaign that if I remember correctly included tv ads, installer links on google owned websites, and even spyware style side installs that came with pop ular programs. Edit: ~10 years ago I definitely remember having to support users that accidentally installed chrome, and didnt even realize something had changed, except they couldnt use some awful ie only webpage they needed.
    - sliken 9y ago
      I switched to chrome pretty early on. Firefox was pretty unusable then. Typically with more than 8 tabs or so, some damn ad in some damn tab would call flash, and the whole thing would hang. Chrome used a different CPU per tab and put flash in it's own process so it wouldn't hang the entire browser. I was quite impressed and told everyone I know how much better it was. Pretty quickly I switched. Even today I get the occasional query from a windows or mac user who wants the "good" browser installed instead of IE or Safari. Yes, novices still can't install their own browser no matter how easy it is.
- confounded 9y ago
  As you implicitly identify, the problem is that LibreOffice isn’t better than Word. Users learn new things all the time, and are strongly motivated to do so when it offers real benefits, and hold a real grudge when it’s for cost savings (or an ideological concept they don’t identify with). A FOSS MS Office killer would be more like Google docs or Etherpad, and would be way easier to open source across platforms, and maintain collaboratively. It could offer huge benefits beyond authorization and collaboration, such as open APIs so departments can automate bureaucratic review processes, or publishing to blogs and websites.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > Google Docs is a fierce competitor of Microsoft Office. Only if one likes to give all private data to Google and the respective Microsoft Office knowledge resumes to a simple typewriter letters and basic data in tabular format.
  - mjcohen 9y ago
    Google Docs can be used locally.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Where it is described how to use Google Docs with zero communication between Google servers, beyond the initial installation? Even so, it only covers the first part of my comment.
- scythe 9y ago
  Google Docs and MS Office probably have better UX testing protocols than OpenOffice et al. FLOSS tends to skimp on tests because there are lots of people willing to be coders and nobody who wants to do product testing. Unfortunately that's a hard problem to fix, I think, although elementaryOS seems to have something up their sleeve. A lot of Linux stuff feels "unpolished", even though lots of people have tried to polish it. But without data, the gatekeeper of the repository only has their natural discretion when determining which contributor is best at polishing the UI. What is true is that this isn't usually devastating to the user experience: anyone who has enough goodwill towards the idea of FLOSS can use free software UIs and be happy about it, but without that, the rough edges might be putting people off.
- jcrawfordor 9y ago
  I have sort of an underlying philosophical theory that open-source projects that start out as attempts to clone a popular commercial package will ultimately fail. The reasoning goes like this: even if you achieve a good clone, the commercial project will move along and you will not be able to keep up. Your desire to catch a user-base that is resistant to change will actually encourage you to not keep up, as at first this looks like a kind of success, but then a few years down the road you will realize that you are terrible behind. As an example, look at LibreOffice. It is widely marketed by OSS enthusiasts as "just like Office" and "just as good as Office," but it struggled to meet feature parity while remaining stable early on. Then, MS transitioned Office to the Ribbon UI. This was absolutely hated by a fairly large group of users, and it became a marketing point, at least in my circles, for LibreOffice that it had not made such a transition. This pulled in more users and looked like a success story. Years later, though, Office users have adapted to the Ribbon UI and discovered its advantages, and when you compare Office to LibreOffice, LibreOffice seems hopelessly out of date. I think KDE is another example of this phenomenon as it was commonly seen as the best way to transition from Windows. But as a project it seriously struggled to retain interest after Microsoft continued to evolve their desktop environment in big ways, and now that I think they've successfully divorced themselves from any "clone of Windows" objectives they're still not really able to make up for the lost steam. For just a last example, I would point to The GIMP, which has successfully navigated the transition from "a kind of clone of Photoshop" to "a kind of clone of a very old version of Photoshop."
  - lakechfoma 9y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree with all of that except GIMP. The UI in GIMP is horrendous and the only reason it's successful IMO is because the gap it fills is that of an expensive and confusing product that is niche to a lot of people who need some of the functionality but don't use it for their job. I use it quite often (and loathe the interface) but I'll never pay for photoshop because I don't need the pro tool and after 10+ years of GIMP I don't want to shake up.
    - progman 9y ago
      To me it's exactly the opposite. I am glad that KDE remained to be a usable desktop, and did not follow the Win 8 GUI disaster. I also appreciate that LibreOffice sticks to the classical menu system and doesn't overload the desktop window with a multiple of icons where most of them are barely used.
forinti 9y ago
Windows and Office have changed so much in the last years that I thought it would be just a perfect setting for people to move to Linux and LibreOffice. But people lots of people stick to whatever has an MS logo on it. I had an interesting conversation once with a relative who wanted Windows on a tablet. He argued that it would be easier to configure Wifi. I just had to point out that he couldn't configure Wifi on Windows either. Still, he thought it would be easier.

danieldk 9y ago

From what I could glean, they struggled with user interface issues - end users didn't like having to relearn how to use their very-similar-but-not-quite-the-same-word-processor software. I find this very interesting. We are all familiar with less tech-savvy users that are only comfortable what they know. However, Google Docs is a fierce competitor of Microsoft Office. Android/iOS replaced Windows for a lot of regular users. Chrome crushed the competition, including Internet Explorer. Why are these examples different? Is it because these alternatives did not try to emulate Microsoft's products and hence didn't cause the impression that 'it's almost the same, but glitchy'. Or was the experience of these products so much better than Microsoft's counterparts? What lesson could the FLOSS world learn here?

extrapickles 9y ago
If you collaboratively produce documents at your workplace, Google Docs wins by a large margin. Microsoft products have way too many issues when multiple people are editing the same large (100-200 page) document. Edit: The takeaway for FOSS is that the product has to be lower frustration than the alternative for it to win out.
- iaonsdionio 9y ago
  That sounds like a nightmare. Google Docs is barely powerful enough for writing a three-page letter. I can't imagine writing a collaborative 200-page document with it. LaTeX + git would be the ideal, but my coworkers would shoot me for suggesting it.
  - watwut 9y ago
    You would spend half of time solving merge conflicts and dealing with compile errors after bad merge constantly.
    - paulmd 9y ago
      Divide your document into chapters, have one tex file per chapter, plus a driver file that runs the whole document (by \include'ing the individual chapter files).
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        Now try to explain that to the secretary that sends PowerPoint files with Word and Excel documents embedded in them.
        extrapickles 9y ago
        Exactly. I shudder at the thought of training a office manager to use latex or git. Open source has all the technical pieces to do a good job of the issue, but they rarely are seamlessly integrated into a program that someone can be highly successful just by clicking on things that look like what they want.
    - OxO4 9y ago
      Not at all. If you do basic coordination of who is editing which section when, merge conflicts are exceedingly rare. I've collaborated on multiple 10-ish page documents (research papers) with 3+ people using LaTeX+git and it has worked just fine.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Spend money to get your system into schools, because a huge proportion of workers will adamantly HATE anybody who tries to make them learn something new after their first few years working. Apple figured it out. Microsoft figured it out. Google is figuring it out. GNU hasn't quite gotten there.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  No, what workers hate is when they have to learn something new for no reason. If you give them something new that actually improves their lives, makes it easier for them to do their jobs, they'll embrace it (usually). That doesn't happen often, because employers and decision makers rarely look at things from the perspective of the employee, preferring instead to make their own jobs easier at the expense of others.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    That's a good point, although when you maliciously box out competitors from being easily compatible with your product once your audience is locked in... Well, it starts to smell like antitrust behavior, honestly. These changes WOULD make peoples' lives better and easier, if they were allowed to be compatible with the products those people were previously using. To prevent that, incumbents do everything possible to stop any new/different systems from interacting with the ones that they sell. And the whole point is that that would not be an issue if people were willing to hold their noses for a damned second and migrate to systems that ARE accessible and open and easy to use with various products from a plethora of different vendors. That way, the barrier of 'pointlessly changing things' will be vastly reduced in the future. You say the managers are short-sighted and lazy, but so are the workers. It's only human.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
      Of course. We are familiar with the concept that, in general, people will act in their own short term self interest. An open, compatible computing world sounds great to you and me because we are computer people with heavy investment in the future of computing. This is not the case for most workers or their managers and executives.
watwut 9y ago
Being comfortable with what you know is one thing. The other one is that "they are just unwilling to learn something different" is comfortable narrative if you are advocate, but oftentimes too much of a simplification. At least based on what I observed when geeks interacted with users. Google Docs, Adroid and iOS for that matter worked hard on making everything intuitive for average person. They are easy to start with. They are less frustrating for use case they are meant for then Microsoft products. Otherwise said, someone with influence and power in team who made sure users needs were cared about in gazimillion of small details. And they look good. Many geeks are quick to write off users and assume they are dumb instead of trying to understand what those people do or need. As far as geek is concerned, the user is doing some stupid generic thing in word processor. If something does not work, it is unimportant edge case that user should not care about - because geek dont need it. People who say that it is all about users being lazy generally never valued what those users do and dont consider half their needs to be legitimate. I mean, people were "just not willing to learn something new" for not jumping to open office from Excel, but I swear to got that excel was both faster/responsive and easier to use at that time and open office really missed features that people I knew actually used. Very-similar-but-not-quite-the-same-word-processor software may mean that report you used to generate within an hour suddenly takes three and still does not look good enough. Clunky may mean twice as much clicking for often performed tasks. If may mean that often used features are awfully complicated or hidden from sight. Or that it is generally slower in things that are visible while fast in things that dont matter. You cant just write that off as lazy or stupid users to their face and cant just get offended and then get aggressive when they talk about their frustrations (which is what I have seen geeks to do).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
_tulpa 9y ago
> Why are these examples different? Chrome was so much better than IE or firefox when it came out. Android/iOS replacing windows is because before that windows was the only option, then something came along that better suited their needs and they rolled with it. Libreoffice on the other hand is a clusterfuck of awkward, clunky, unintuitive, and dated UI design. It's not even comparable to MS Office or Google Docs in terms of usability, and that's before you add the extra layer of unfamiliarity. And now google docs doesn't cost money so why would you bother using Libreoffice unless you were forced to?
- dec0dedab0de 9y ago
  Chrome was so much better than IE or firefox when it came out. While I never saw chrome as better than Firefox, thats just a matter of taste. I dont think the average user's sense of quality had anything to do with its rise. It was a very heavy marketing campaign that if I remember correctly included tv ads, installer links on google owned websites, and even spyware style side installs that came with pop ular programs. Edit: ~10 years ago I definitely remember having to support users that accidentally installed chrome, and didnt even realize something had changed, except they couldnt use some awful ie only webpage they needed.
  - sliken 9y ago
    I switched to chrome pretty early on. Firefox was pretty unusable then. Typically with more than 8 tabs or so, some damn ad in some damn tab would call flash, and the whole thing would hang. Chrome used a different CPU per tab and put flash in it's own process so it wouldn't hang the entire browser. I was quite impressed and told everyone I know how much better it was. Pretty quickly I switched. Even today I get the occasional query from a windows or mac user who wants the "good" browser installed instead of IE or Safari. Yes, novices still can't install their own browser no matter how easy it is.
confounded 9y ago
As you implicitly identify, the problem is that LibreOffice isn’t better than Word. Users learn new things all the time, and are strongly motivated to do so when it offers real benefits, and hold a real grudge when it’s for cost savings (or an ideological concept they don’t identify with). A FOSS MS Office killer would be more like Google docs or Etherpad, and would be way easier to open source across platforms, and maintain collaboratively. It could offer huge benefits beyond authorization and collaboration, such as open APIs so departments can automate bureaucratic review processes, or publishing to blogs and websites.
pjmlp 9y ago
> Google Docs is a fierce competitor of Microsoft Office. Only if one likes to give all private data to Google and the respective Microsoft Office knowledge resumes to a simple typewriter letters and basic data in tabular format.
- mjcohen 9y ago
  Google Docs can be used locally.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Where it is described how to use Google Docs with zero communication between Google servers, beyond the initial installation? Even so, it only covers the first part of my comment.
scythe 9y ago
Google Docs and MS Office probably have better UX testing protocols than OpenOffice et al. FLOSS tends to skimp on tests because there are lots of people willing to be coders and nobody who wants to do product testing. Unfortunately that's a hard problem to fix, I think, although elementaryOS seems to have something up their sleeve. A lot of Linux stuff feels "unpolished", even though lots of people have tried to polish it. But without data, the gatekeeper of the repository only has their natural discretion when determining which contributor is best at polishing the UI. What is true is that this isn't usually devastating to the user experience: anyone who has enough goodwill towards the idea of FLOSS can use free software UIs and be happy about it, but without that, the rough edges might be putting people off.
jcrawfordor 9y ago
I have sort of an underlying philosophical theory that open-source projects that start out as attempts to clone a popular commercial package will ultimately fail. The reasoning goes like this: even if you achieve a good clone, the commercial project will move along and you will not be able to keep up. Your desire to catch a user-base that is resistant to change will actually encourage you to not keep up, as at first this looks like a kind of success, but then a few years down the road you will realize that you are terrible behind. As an example, look at LibreOffice. It is widely marketed by OSS enthusiasts as "just like Office" and "just as good as Office," but it struggled to meet feature parity while remaining stable early on. Then, MS transitioned Office to the Ribbon UI. This was absolutely hated by a fairly large group of users, and it became a marketing point, at least in my circles, for LibreOffice that it had not made such a transition. This pulled in more users and looked like a success story. Years later, though, Office users have adapted to the Ribbon UI and discovered its advantages, and when you compare Office to LibreOffice, LibreOffice seems hopelessly out of date. I think KDE is another example of this phenomenon as it was commonly seen as the best way to transition from Windows. But as a project it seriously struggled to retain interest after Microsoft continued to evolve their desktop environment in big ways, and now that I think they've successfully divorced themselves from any "clone of Windows" objectives they're still not really able to make up for the lost steam. For just a last example, I would point to The GIMP, which has successfully navigated the transition from "a kind of clone of Photoshop" to "a kind of clone of a very old version of Photoshop."
- lakechfoma 9y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with all of that except GIMP. The UI in GIMP is horrendous and the only reason it's successful IMO is because the gap it fills is that of an expensive and confusing product that is niche to a lot of people who need some of the functionality but don't use it for their job. I use it quite often (and loathe the interface) but I'll never pay for photoshop because I don't need the pro tool and after 10+ years of GIMP I don't want to shake up.
  - progman 9y ago
    To me it's exactly the opposite. I am glad that KDE remained to be a usable desktop, and did not follow the Win 8 GUI disaster. I also appreciate that LibreOffice sticks to the classical menu system and doesn't overload the desktop window with a multiple of icons where most of them are barely used.

forinti 9y ago

Windows and Office have changed so much in the last years that I thought it would be just a perfect setting for people to move to Linux and LibreOffice. But people lots of people stick to whatever has an MS logo on it. I had an interesting conversation once with a relative who wanted Windows on a tablet. He argued that it would be easier to configure Wifi. I just had to point out that he couldn't configure Wifi on Windows either. Still, he thought it would be easier.