Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 22:17:12 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net>, "Nils Holland" <nils@tisys.org> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: The myth of the worthwile GUI, was NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <004d01c1642f$2cdb61e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <x8k7x8dioy.7x8@localhost.localdomain>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Gary W. >Swearingen >Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 12:25 PM >To: Nils Holland >Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG; advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks > Imagine a system >that is both easy to use and powerful/flexible. Imagine software that >does the grunt work so you can do creative things. > There's plenty of grunt work that has to be done under Windows. Perhaps if you cited specific examples your statement might be more believable. >It was fine when I was young and eager to exercise the power and >flexibilty and had a full-time Unix system administrator to do the >grunt work, but even if I enjoyed doing the grunt work (which I no >longer do), I find myself spending most of my available time doing >grunt work and have little time left to do more creative things or to >learn about more than poorly-documented system and network software. > People pay you for doing the grunt work. It's why they call it "work" These "creative things" that you are alluding to sound more like "play" to me than work. I think the problem is that your getting burned out and are longing for a job where you sit around dreaming these wonderful dreams and people pay you lots of money for it. Wake up that's only in the movies. There were a number of people that did try doing this a couple years back that ran dot-coms and they are now all bankrupt. I can assure you that being a pure Windows admin or managing a house of all Windows isn't going to be any easier than a house of all UNIX. I know that Microsoft keeps saying it is but they are only doing this to get people like you conned into giving them money for their stuff. But if you do once you get their stuff you find out that it's just as horrible as what you have now. There ain't no free lunch in this world. >Few people who know these usability problems well or discover them >shortly after trying a Unix-like OS, are going to use such an OS by >choice. Few care about the philosphies or ethics of the OS producer >and will use the OS that lets them do non-OS things faster than the >other OSes. Unless you're satisfied going after small niche markets >like HTML servers or free software philosophers (and even if that's >all, as I explained yesterday) you need to work on making your OS >more efficient of user time, more than any other single thing. > I think you've been insulated from real users too long and forgotten how stupid they are. A house full of Windows users isn't any more contented than a house full of UNIX users. People find the stupidest things to waste your time with if your trying to support them, they are never satisfied unless the admin comes down from his office and does their job for them. Every time I've seen any useability improvements added into Windows it just makes the users even stupider. Back in the command line days they were forced into at least understanding that a filesystem was like a tree. Win 3.1 filemanager came along and drew the tree for them then they forgot all about the tree image and just started dumping everything in a single directory. Win95 came along and dumped the tree and replaced it with a window with a bunch of icons and now they cannot even dump anything into a single directory anymore. I think your way overestimating the influence of the OS on the users. Users today don't give a rat's ass what OS the computer uses because none of them are willing to do OS-level things like moving files around anymore instead they call the admin to send someone down to do it for them, no matter how simple the latest version of Windows makes it. >Yes, efficiency of user time is vital to the future of an OS. Rubbish. Users today expect everything set up for them and bitch and complain about learning what icon to click to do things. They expect the admin of the company to do it for them, or they expect the manufacturer of the computer to do it for them. They WILL NOT do it themselves no matter how easy you make it. Don't you understand why Microsoft's sales have dropped off in new OS sales? It's because 6 years ago the general user community was actually willing to INSTALL THE OS ON THEIR EXISTING HARDWARE!! Today, they aren't willing to do that and if they want the latest version of Windows they just buy a system with it preinstalled. >Your >measure of OS performance and powerfulness should weigh that more >than speed of IP transfers or a thousand other low-level features. >And flexibility is only important to the extent that it reduces the >time it takes for a user to do something (including the learning >process to do it). > All of this is irrelevant to today's users. Today the users are not willing to spend any time at all learning how to do something. It therefore doesen't matter if it takes 30 seconds to do something on an OS, or 30 minutes, the general userbase population will not even spend the 30 seconds anymore. The first guy that can design an artificial intelligence program that can parse "I want to send an e-mail to that guy, you know, the one that mailed me yesterday about that thing, you know?" and cause the computer to create, compose and transmit an e-mail to the exact person they are thinking about is going to make a million dollars. >Now, we will agree that a dumb GUI is actually less efficient than >use of a dumb config file. But we should be past all that by now. >GUIs should be smart. They can even be made to look exactly like >a dumb config file, but in fact be a kind of smart config file. >Good GUIs think for you. They check for typos and conflicts and >dependancies. They offer you choices so you don't have to remember >them. They make info and help available to you. > The userbase is completely uninterested in reading the info or help presented to them, is incapabable of making choices anymore, is perfectly able to spell "which" when they mean "witch" and not see the error no matter how long they stare at it, and cannot understand what a config file does or why it's needed anymore. >Developers of other OSes and their applications are putting lots of >effort into putting smarts into user interfaces so that users can use >their time to be smart about other things. You will not compete with >them if you only put your effort into the non-user-interface parts of >OSes and their applications. > The idea that a user interface can be made so smart and so easy to use that it will give the users a lot of extra time is a mirage that is unreachable. If the users are not willing to learn and understand the tool in front of them they simply will create worthless junk. The only thing that these so-called "smart" interfaces really do for stupid morons is to make them THINK that they are producing something desirable and good when in reality they are producing garbage. You sit a dumb blonde in front of a modern wordprocessor today and tell her to type a letter, well she thinks she done good because there's 5 different fonts on the page, 3 different colors, and bullets and bold and italics all over the screen. However the actual text that she is pumping out is unintelligible with atrocious grammer, spelling errors all over the place, a vocabulary of less than 50 words, and if presented in a 5th grade grammer school class would get an F. What keeps the industry going is that there's a lot of dumb blondes out there working as receptionists that have managers that need to keep them occupied doing something other than playing solitare while they sit on the phone. So, it is true that these smart GUI interfaces do fill a need, just not the one you think is being filled. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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