Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 12:01:48 +0200 From: Jeremy Lea <reg@shale.csir.co.za> To: dyson@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com>, jamie@itribe.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft the GUI King (was Re: ATT Unix for Windows) Message-ID: <19970903120148.07978@shale.csir.co.za> In-Reply-To: <199709030835.DAA00405@dyson.iquest.net>; from John S. Dyson on Wed, Sep 03, 1997 at 03:35:28AM -0500 References: <199709030704.BAA12723@obie.softweyr.ml.org> <199709030835.DAA00405@dyson.iquest.net>
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To everyone who's been debating this back and forth: I was involved yesterday in a short debate/arguement with some of our management team about which spreadsheet we should be using (in a engineering R&D environement). They were worried about using Excel/Quattro Pro, and my comment was that if they were worried about the name on the box then they had missed the point that we should rather be using a mathemtics/statistics environment (e.g Matlab/SAS) for most of our work. But it got me thinking about analogies... Anyway, to get to the point: Compare OSs/software/hardware with cars. Most people are happy to drive a little Ford Fiesta, or a VW or a Toyota (or something similar). A nice little runabout built in the millions, where the salesmen only asks "What colour do you want?". That's the market Windows95 is aimed at... NT is for the guys who say "1300cc, no thanks. I'll have the 2l with fuel injection. Blue." Little bit more power under the hood, but the same body. Some people want a luxury model, and they end up with the PPro200/AWE64/ 24xCD-ROM/17" monitor... but it still only gets them from A to B, although it is a much better trip. Unix is for the 4x4's... the guys who like to take the car out somewhere 3 days from the nearest garage and dont want it breaking down, and if it does then they dont want to pop the hood to discover "CAUTION. Not not open. No user servicable components inside." stickers. I use FreeBSD because I'm one of those people who like to drive an old, small car that I dont have to wash every morning, that I can fix with a few simple tools when it does break down, which shouldn't be very often, and doesn't cost me a fortune to keep going... I like my computer the same. But, to draw a conclusion, there is no point in trying to make a Ford Fiesta which can be serviced by any "dumb blonde"... you're wasting your money. You can also drive a Ford Fiesta around the world, but you'll spend a lot of time fixing it. When people agree on one standard design for a car, they'll start using one standard OS the next day... Ponder the idea for awhile and you'll see a lot of sense in the analogy, especially when it comes to standardised components. When it comes to the user interface, however, you find that most cars are fairly similar... interesting isn't it. But the interface is carefully designed to fit the style of working. The UNIX command line is in many ways the same as the levers and stuff on a Model T Ford... it comes out of a time past. However computers dont behave like cars... Something which has been touched on in this thread, and I think is the real issue, is that computers essentially offer you a set of tools which you plug together like Lego, to build a machine which does the job for you. Unix works like that, but to move it into a GUI environment you have to figure out how to discribe the process of sticking the blocks together in such a way that it is flexible and understandable. Lego doesn't come with a manual for how to put the blocks together, or tell you that you can only stick blue blocks onto blue blocks. Windows doesn't work like this. You buy the space ship or the castle preassembled, and just play with it. If you want to debate/discuss/move forward, then we should rather be thinking about how to make the Unix tool model fit into a world of appelets, windows and hyperlinks (i.e. a distributed object computing environment). Think I just overspent on my 2c budget... -Jeremy -- .sig.gz
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