User:Hfastedge/essays/swdevel

Rehash: Gentoo linux and software the markets to impatience

Originally from (me on /.) : http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49123&cid=4971328

This is verbatim a comment of mine. But it's a good rehash of some of my thinking over the last few weeks, and i want it saved. I'll probably be coming back to this to make a better constructed essay.

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think it is time to get away from the notion of the user interface with no learning curve

Well said. You know, for years now, we have been able to feel this affect on the members of our society that arent like us. We can feel the impatience of our busy soccer mom's who have no time but to drive their kids....to soccer, or talk on the phone to the other soccer moms. We all hate that companies market to impatience.

Now an example, Mp3.com, i like its free music, yet I've notice over my 3 years of using it, that every year or so, it changes its interface. This is too fool the dumbasses that mp3.com is working hard at its service. But its purely a graphical change, and in actuality, you have to relearn how to use it and look at it.

So we see here that the dumbasses at mp3.com's marketing scheme are marketing toward that impatient crowd of people that need to feel like their hand is being held, yet its interesting how at the same time, this has an anti effect, namely confusion.

Anyway, I believe that the solution is conservatism to all of this FUCKING HEADACHE of marketronism. But the funny thing is that american society is all but conservative. We're all about moving around....our techies are all about diversity...because we CAN make viral copies of software according to a copyleft, we WILL.

To continue this emphasis on the power of conservatism. Consider Apple Computer and Microsoft. Microsoft is HUGE, in order to get so huge, they had to market very aggresively. They THOUGHT, that in order to stay huge, they had to do sooooo much work on their products. Well, this definately backfired. Microsoft got itself into this rut where it saw itself delivering complete rewrites of all its products every few years. As you know, if not handled well (which is inevitable given the pace they go at), this causes version fatigue which means the user is going to have to relearn their skillsets for the newer version of the _exact_same_product_. Sorry to be such a pro/con diallectical swinger but, Apple on the other hand has done, to my opinion, a lot more to foster usability. It did this through two means:

1. actually focusing on doing usability research and developing (over 20 years) the [[apple human interface guidelines
2. being conservative

More on this second point, Apple's conseratism isnt a magic formula, its actually quite simple: still do, but do it less quickly. Theres nothing wrong with this, it gives the opportunity to be more introspective on your product with the simple hope of improving it until its polished, so that when the users have to be burdened, its not as bad. The greatest example of this is Apple's switchover to Mac OS X. From what I have been able to gather , Mac OS X has been in latent (eg brainchild/pipedream) development since 1987ish, it really started getting active through Next's activities in the mid 90's, and was heavily developed by the next people within apple from 96.5 onwards. Anyway, while everyone in the world was starting to feel the strain that OS9 was taking while it dragged on through the late 90's, apple was heavily polishing a system that would lay the foundations for it to switch to and remain with for a very long time. When Mac OS X finally rolled out, it did so with some decent momentum, and where did this momentum come from? not from marketing hype to consumers (the lowest form), not from marketing hype to developers (apple just told them: 'this is how its going to be now'), NO, but the momentum came from its internal strength. Apple's conservative plan of action produced a PLATFORM for developers and consumers, and they released it when they were ready (or at the very latest that they could possibly afford). To summarize: apple layed developed itself a new paradigm, to do this, followed its own excellent standards and waited until they were reflected in this new technology: they indeed made a paradigm shift with Mac OS X in 2001, and its one with a foundation that will last them at least 10 years. Microsoft, however, plans its paradigm shifts, and spoon feeds them down the consumers throats (usually every 1-3 years) ; because, it really does have the manpower and internal momentum to do so.

Next, I will be discussing some of the historical situations that are similar to this.

Anyway: the opensource aspect of this all: Because gentoo CAN exist on its own, instead of taking advantage of debian's system of developers and simply building on top of this... (eg, theres NOTHING stopping them from simply writing a pythonized version of apt that gets source (apt-get source)....

Anyway, this semi rant began because i was reminded of an article on version fatigue:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/20/1223247

And I think that is also on the same lines as this and touches some different angles (by ben stein). http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/16/1724232