Re: Release plans

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Richard M. Stallman wrote:
> Millions of people use Windows.  Why?  Partly because that's what came
> on the machine, partly because they don't care, and partly by choice.

It is a bit temptating to see this list as grasping all possibilties. I 
think that is a mistake.

I happened to watch the rise of ms windows. I was astonished and had a 
hard time to understand what was happening. No one of course can really 
tell the reason behind the success, but some things I noticed where:

- The advertising campaign from MS said to the user "you should decide 
what programs you have on your pc". Very smart. If you tried to tell 
users that there are better programs (there were!) then you just had to 
face that the user "wanted to decide".

- The free software world in my opinion did exactly the opposite. It 
said to the users "we know what is best for you" (because we are 
smarter). This is a psychological mistake. And it is not an easy one to 
cure.

- The unix vendor at that time had the best software. I tried to 
encourage them to make something that we could actually use in a company 
environment. The response I got was "we are best", "when the user 
understands they will chose us". Ok, they were best, but today the user 
can rather understand that windows is no longer technically inferior (at 
least not overall). So as I see it there were clearly something that the 
unix vendors did not understand: meeting the needs of the users and the 
companies. (The unix vendors did of course not make free software, but 
the grounds for free software is standards and that is why the unix 
vendors where important.)

- First ms focused on GUI aspects and usability. When I read messages 
from experts at ms on this subject I often found the messages 
surprisingly good. It looked to my like they did take it seriously - and 
that really requires much thought.

- The free software world seem sometimes to think that creativity 
regarding GUI is  making a new GUI. (MS rather integrated different 
aspects and made the interface uniform. And that was not made out of 
laziness, it was as I saw it after careful thought.)

- One of the strength that ms today has it that it has control (at least 
to some degree) over cooperation between different parts of its 
software). They can achieve that because they have everything under one 
umbrella and also have the man power to try to achieve it. Cooperation 
is a very, very difficult thing in my opinion. Complexity and scaling 
jumps in.