Google chase could trip up Microsoft

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"But, once we are used to everybody having different but compatible desktops, we will laugh about the days when there was no choice."

That era already happened, and people rejoiced when it was over.

Imagine a world with five evenly split operating systems/desktops all taking up 20% of the market share. Five times the amount of training for support employees, five times the amount of drivers, wildly increased development time for applications that are trying to be cross-platform. I could go on and on.

Even now on Linux having to bounce back and forth between KDE vs. Gnome can be frustrating experience which no average computer user wants to deal with.

The facts about people and computers remain the same. The average person shouldn't have to know how it works to use it. You don't need to know how your car works to drive it. Both Apple and Microsoft understand this, but most Linux groups pretend to ignore it. Familiarity is everything.

I won't argue about Linux's capabilities but it has a LONG way to go before people will accept it broadly. If MacOS X looked like OS/2 or Windows required people to download the source code from a CVS tree and recompile the kernel for the latest patches would people want to use them?

If Linux wanted to REALLY put pressure on Microsoft they would unite the distros to come up with a guaranteed set of features everyone could develop against. They would hide every trace of the command line unless a person actually wanted to use it. And the SINGLE user interface would be flashy, animated, and elegant.

Posted by: Yensi717   Posted on: 11/01/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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