5 ms·

There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the thesis is as follows: "This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been

There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the thesis is as follows: "This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else." The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, DEC, Solaris. It was the OEM bundling and the illegal anti competitive behaviour for which Microsoft was found guilty. This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop. If it were about quality, surely everyone's favourite UX would have been dominant. But it isn't; it sits around the same usage stats as Linux. And while bugs exist in GNOME and Gtk, I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`

klodolph 6y ago
OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors. OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make money from development tools. BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft. I don’t think I can be in a room with five people without getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed—it appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn’t have much of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some ways it was seen as more of a “toy” than its competitors. DEC’s business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s. Making good processors isn’t enough, it turns out. Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows. > This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop. To be clear, I’m not saying that that isn’t the main reason—just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did a ton of things right. They made new operating systems that consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as possible for developers. Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.
rablackburn 6y ago
(in the context of consumer computing) The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant for so long you either have to a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate users or b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple). Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms, but it takes a long time, and users are unforgiving. GNU/Linux is fantastic for power users, but the moment a 'normal' user has to edit a text config file, or open a terminal, we've lost them. When they try to do something that they're use to doing (see thumbnails of their files when choosing them) and it's not possible, GNU/Linux stops being a valid alternative. > I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png` You're uncharitably trivialising the author's point. A common user task is selecting an image file from your device (to upload/edit/share). A user will often have many images in a folder and they want to quickly select the one they're thinking of. There is an almost universally accepted solution (or 'best practice') to this problem, which is rendering each image visually so that the user can select the correct one at a glance (either as a thumbnail view in a file picker, or a literal grid of images as in iOS). GNOME and Gtk have not implemented this widely accepted (in fact, expected) behaviour, despite it being raised as an issue nearly 17 years ago. Instead you (and others) argue points like "well they should rename and manage their files", "it's just an extra click", "it's not that important or else it would exist already", "its just one inconvenient thing, get over it". And there are conversations to have around those points, but at the end of the day people are going to have a negative experience with the product because "it can't even render thumbnails". And the point is that this _isn't_ an isolated issue. Every project has something like this (Apple and Microsoft still have these issues), but we're particularly bad at addressing the issue, or even admitting it exists.
- fnord123 6y ago
  The article is an essay written upside down. The thesis is that there was no quality competition to windows and that's why it is dominant. This is plainly incorrect. The era when Windows gained total dominance was when everyone was getting daily or weekly bsods. It is a deep and complex topic and it wasn't 'heres a bug I don't like'. Microsoft had a monopoly on the sneakernet: file formats like xls, doc, and the like needed windows computers. They had an amazing sales force. They did the illegal partnering I mentioned. Loads of aspects. Quality is not a primary component here. Just like the inherent quality of javascript doesn't drive it. It's the platform and the platform effects and so on.

klodolph 6y ago

OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors. OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make money from development tools. BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft. I don’t think I can be in a room with five people without getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed—it appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn’t have much of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some ways it was seen as more of a “toy” than its competitors. DEC’s business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s. Making good processors isn’t enough, it turns out. Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows. > This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop. To be clear, I’m not saying that that isn’t the main reason—just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did a ton of things right. They made new operating systems that consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as possible for developers. Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.

rablackburn 6y ago

(in the context of consumer computing) The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant for so long you either have to a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate users or b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple). Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms, but it takes a long time, and users are unforgiving. GNU/Linux is fantastic for power users, but the moment a 'normal' user has to edit a text config file, or open a terminal, we've lost them. When they try to do something that they're use to doing (see thumbnails of their files when choosing them) and it's not possible, GNU/Linux stops being a valid alternative. > I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png` You're uncharitably trivialising the author's point. A common user task is selecting an image file from your device (to upload/edit/share). A user will often have many images in a folder and they want to quickly select the one they're thinking of. There is an almost universally accepted solution (or 'best practice') to this problem, which is rendering each image visually so that the user can select the correct one at a glance (either as a thumbnail view in a file picker, or a literal grid of images as in iOS). GNOME and Gtk have not implemented this widely accepted (in fact, expected) behaviour, despite it being raised as an issue nearly 17 years ago. Instead you (and others) argue points like "well they should rename and manage their files", "it's just an extra click", "it's not that important or else it would exist already", "its just one inconvenient thing, get over it". And there are conversations to have around those points, but at the end of the day people are going to have a negative experience with the product because "it can't even render thumbnails". And the point is that this _isn't_ an isolated issue. Every project has something like this (Apple and Microsoft still have these issues), but we're particularly bad at addressing the issue, or even admitting it exists.

fnord123 6y ago
The article is an essay written upside down. The thesis is that there was no quality competition to windows and that's why it is dominant. This is plainly incorrect. The era when Windows gained total dominance was when everyone was getting daily or weekly bsods. It is a deep and complex topic and it wasn't 'heres a bug I don't like'. Microsoft had a monopoly on the sneakernet: file formats like xls, doc, and the like needed windows computers. They had an amazing sales force. They did the illegal partnering I mentioned. Loads of aspects. Quality is not a primary component here. Just like the inherent quality of javascript doesn't drive it. It's the platform and the platform effects and so on.