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You wrote: "People used Opera because other people used Opera". I am originally from Russia and my wife is from Belarus, and I can tell you that's very common
by photorized 14y ago
You wrote: "People used Opera because other people used Opera".
I am originally from Russia and my wife is from Belarus, and I can tell you that's very common in former Soviet Republics. They just pick a software package and stay with it, e.g. Norton Commander/FAR Manager instead of command line or built-in OS file managers, RAR instead of Zip etc etc. I believe this mainly has to do with user mentality than the qualities of the product itself.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThat's true in any country, and in any industry. Momentum is hugely important, and us hacker types tend to forget that. While we love to try new things out and always ready to switch, most people are content with the things they use, the things they regularly buy, and will only switch if social pressure compels them to.
- photorized 14y agoSocial pressure, exactly. And in countries like Russia, it's much harder to manipulate it. They love their Livejournal and vk.ru, and their Nokia phones (sometimes to a fault - Nokia is closing all stores in Russia), and they don't use Google or Facebook. Google tried and failed, now FB is trying. And Zuckerberg won't be able to solve this one, without some M&A. Fascinating.
- joonix 14y agoWhy is Nokia closing their stores there if they've been so successful?
- Surio 14y agoOff-topic: But I consider all those softwares you mentioned to be (still) bloody good at what they do too. So, why bother changing? ;-)
- photorized 14y agoNorton Commander was awesome on MS DOS. Simple and elegant, yet powerful. As for RAR - 95% of the time (emailing attachments), Zip would work just fine, especially on the receiving end, without forcing the recipient to install anything.
- Surio 14y agoDon't you find RAR's compression ratio better? Besides one can use 7zip or peazip to open the RAR files anyway. Nokia also does not seem to realise that it has a lot of customer goodwill in many, many countries. I wish and hope they do not squander it away.
- 4ad 14y agoI use zip because it's ubiquitous, but I use WinRAR to manage my zip archives because it's so much better than any other tool on Windows.