__/ [ Rex Ballard ] on Friday 02 June 2006 09:05 \__
>
> Ted Landry wrote:
>> kinda cool to see a reasonable chart of all oses over the years and how
>> they rank on overall usability and overall quality. seems highly
>> accurate.
>>
>
<http://www.computerworld.com/html/collateral/msvistatour/02introchart.html>
>
> The picture is cute, but as the caption shows, the page is sponsored by
> Vista (or at least displays the Vista trademarks), and the ratings are
> "Based on the subjective assesments of the Author".
Rex, I spent about 10-15 minutes chasing information about the conductor of
this little 'study'. My searches were not very fruitful, but the guy in
question does not seem to be an authority, not even in the field of
usability. I failed to find anything about that study and, trust me, I am
skilled when it comes to search engines.
To me, this rudimentary, coarse, and rough graph (seems somewhat Excel
generated) is a toy output that was appended just to support the hypothesis
that Vista made some progress, but Macs are ahead. I noticed in my searches
that Scot is defensive of Macs (he mentions Guy Kawasaki as well) and posted
critiques of Windows Vista in his newsletters. As I said in my other post,
there is no mention of what Linux distribution was used. It just says
"Linux". Linux is a kernel, ferchristsake! It's not an O/S.
> Let's look at what Microsoft does right.
> They have excellent self-help systems. Wizards, pop-ups, dancing
> paperclips, and dancing puppy-dogs are more than willing to help you,
> even if you don't want help. For new users, who haven't been using a
> computer for more than a year or two, this is a pretty important
> feature. Nearly 1 billion people in the world have learned to use a
> computer by using Windows and it's help packages.
A good system need not use wizards. It should do the right thing without user
intervention and give some flexible tools, just in case the user /does/ want
to intervene. Different levels of intervention, e.g. advanced and auto-pilot
are much appreciated, too.
In Ubuntu, for example, provided that there is a DHCP server on the network,
everything will work 'out of the box', without unneeded prompts. What is
wrong with that? Who needs wizards anyway? Graphical wizards and dancing
devils (not Penguins) are all merely gift wrappings. They give a good
impression, but serve little or no function. Apple are no exception in that
respect, so I don't speak of Microsoft in isolation.
I suspect that if you counted the number of keyboard clicks throughout a good
Linux installer session and compared that with Windows, you'd be stunned
(well, not you and I, but the sheeple might).
> Mac OS/X has a much more "artistic" display, but doesn't have nearly as
> many applications as Linux distributions such as SUSE 10.0 Enterprise
> Linux workstation, or Linspire professional. It's possible that the
> user was evaluating Knoppix or debian or slackware.
An infinite choice (whether free variables or preset conditions) is a heaven
for any biased study. Researchers would insist that these are openly,
entirely, and explicitly mentioned, along with reasonable elaboration on
other parameters/values/settings attempted. The best of all option ought to
have been used in this study in order to make it convincing.
This makes you question about all the TCO studies as well.
> One of the advantages of Linux is that users can balance eye-candy with
> performance. A KDE desktop, with all the bells and whistles enabled
> supports about everything but 3-D rotation of windows (a feature of
> extremely limited value on a true two dimensional display.
Very true, based on experience.
> Furthermore, Linux offers the Xerox Virtual Desktop, a feature which
> Xerox refuses to license to Microsoft and Apple until they agree to pay
> back royalties for the Xerox/PARC technologies they have been using for
> the last 20 years.
>
> In fact, Linux has the benefit of a number of "retaliatory"
> technologies which are ONLY supported on Linux. In addition, more and
> more 3rd party vendors are coding to the Unix/Linux API and using
> cygwin for the Windows implementations. More and more Windows
> applications are actually Linux applications.
>
> Vista isn't even out yet, but it gets glowing reviews and the highest
> rating?
> Linux gets rated as equal to Windows 2000?
> Sounds like some "Bare-Bones" Linux distribution to me.
Reminds me of the Microsoft FUD that compared OpenOffice to Office 97. What
have Microsoft been innovating since 1997 anyway?
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Data lacking semantics is currency in an island
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
9:05am up 35 days 15:37, 10 users, load average: 2.84, 2.95, 2.91
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