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Re: What Open Source Can Learn From Steve Jobs, Part 1
Posted by: Barbara Hudson 2011-10-25 06:08:36
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The passing of Steve Jobs earlier this month triggered reactions that spanned the gamut -- from expressions of appreciation and sober reflection to some tasteless extremes of zealotry from a subset of the open source community. We can learn a lot from Steve Jobs, even if we ultimately have different goals. Back in 1997, Steve Jobs made it clear that the way to go forward was not to continue with the "Apple vs. Microsoft" mentality but to concentrate on what made Apple uniquely Apple. As long as Apple was locked into direct competition with Microsoft, it yielded the home-field advantage.
"It would be far more constructive to strike up a working relationship with the producers of proprietary programs to help them get onto open platforms. Unfortunately, admitting that proprietary programs have their place is something that some people just can't do. Their zealotry blinds them, and makes them focus on the competition from proprietary software instead of looking at the end-user."
The WINE project has a set of scripts you can can run on the source to improve compatibility with wine, and a few people to target WINE as a platform.
The two major problems are marketshare and middleware. A lot a middleware does not run on Linux (but more than has in the past), and if you're already a big player it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to support open source platform s. The exception is server software where open source is the big player.
For innovation check out the enlightenment desktop, which does some pretty cool things like profile switches, and the ability to scale to almost any screen size.
Now while there can be a general usability issue there are people out the working on it.
http://www.openusability.org/
Bottom line there are people working on it and every week it's getting better for everybody.
The WINE project has a set of scripts you can can run on the source to improve compatibility with wine, and a few people to target WINE as a platform.
The two major problems are marketshare and middleware. A lot a middleware does not run on Linux (but more than has in the past), and if you're already a big player it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to support open source platform s. The exception is server software where open source is the big player.
For innovation check out the enlightenment desktop, which does some pretty cool things like profile switches, and the ability to scale to almost any screen size.
Now while there can be a general usability issue there are people out the working on it.
http://www.openusability.org/
Bottom line there are people working on it and every week it's getting better for everybody.
Did you catch it? Here I'll capitalize it for you...THE WINE PROJECT...right there is an EPIC fail. While I'll give the Wine guys an E for effort its still a CLI heavy fiddly little beast that frankly is about as user friendly as handing a buzzsaw to a blind man.
A wise poster on another site said something to someone screaming "Linux is ready!" that frankly i think should be looked upon as the gold standard for cutting to the heart of the matter. he said "can someone with median computer knowledge sit in a room by themselves without internet access and get through a normal day? How about first-time setup? If not, it's not ready and it's a powertool."
And THAT, that right there, is the key. Without google, without badly written man pages, can you stick the average user in front of a blank box and have them come away able to work? you can with windows 7, i know this is true because i left my dad's new PC with his new Win 7 HP disc and told him I'd be out at the end of the week to install it. well being impulsive and more than a little impatient he decided "Well if I screw it up he can just come FIX it on the weekend" but you know what? there was NOTHING to fix, not one. I had to show him where to get FF and that was it. it downloaded ALL the drivers and set them up, even pointed him to a page with free and pay AVs for him to choose from.
And THAT is what you should strive for, not trying to be a bad windows clone. Frankly people have never been more net-centric in history, the world lives in FB and plays farmville. But you gotta let go of the geeker "CLI make me leet!" craziness and accept little Suzy the checkout girl doesn't go home and read programming books in the bathtub okay? if you can't hand the average person on the street a blank laptop and a copy of your OS and have them be able to have it up and running with ZERO help then you're not ready and need to fix it PERIOD.
you are about to be given two gifts Linux guys, Win 8 is gonna bomb and tons of good hardware worth billions is gonna be EOLed by MSFT with the death of XP. you COULD gain great share but you have to WANT IT. you can't expect the world to start learning bash scripting and reading programming books, accept this and give them what they want as barb said or give up and just be the geeker OS, your choice.
A wise poster on another site said something to someone screaming "Linux is ready!" that frankly i think should be looked upon as the gold standard for cutting to the heart of the matter. he said "can someone with median computer knowledge sit in a room by themselves without internet access and get through a normal day? How about first-time setup? If not, it's not ready and it's a powertool."
And THAT, that right there, is the key. Without google, without badly written man pages, can you stick the average user in front of a blank box and have them come away able to work? you can with windows 7, i know this is true because i left my dad's new PC with his new Win 7 HP disc and told him I'd be out at the end of the week to install it. well being impulsive and more than a little impatient he decided "Well if I screw it up he can just come FIX it on the weekend" but you know what? there was NOTHING to fix, not one. I had to show him where to get FF and that was it. it downloaded ALL the drivers and set them up, even pointed him to a page with free and pay AVs for him to choose from.
And THAT is what you should strive for, not trying to be a bad windows clone. Frankly people have never been more net-centric in history, the world lives in FB and plays farmville. But you gotta let go of the geeker "CLI make me leet!" craziness and accept little Suzy the checkout girl doesn't go home and read programming books in the bathtub okay? if you can't hand the average person on the street a blank laptop and a copy of your OS and have them be able to have it up and running with ZERO help then you're not ready and need to fix it PERIOD.
you are about to be given two gifts Linux guys, Win 8 is gonna bomb and tons of good hardware worth billions is gonna be EOLed by MSFT with the death of XP. you COULD gain great share but you have to WANT IT. you can't expect the world to start learning bash scripting and reading programming books, accept this and give them what they want as barb said or give up and just be the geeker OS, your choice.
Have you actually used WINE in the past year?
Posted by: WorBlux 2011-10-28 03:54:05 In reply to: hairyfeet
Winecfg has been graphical for ages, and wine-tricks comes with a GUI for the past year. Soon their going to put back-traces in the crash dialog so you'll never use the CLI unless you just happen to roll that way. If you just don't want to fiddle with settinga ever, then there is playonlinux. The bottom line is that effort has been exerted and changes are being made.
First, a disclaimer: I have never owned an Apple device, and I use linux as my day-to-day desktop. My only use of Windows is for compatibility testing and printing with what was (according to the box) supposed to be a linux-compatible printer, or for wifi (broken yet again by another update).
I think that the "Window of opportunity" (pardon the pun) for Linux was Vista. If people don't like Win8, they'll just continue to run Vista (which is now more stable than many Linux desktop environments) or Win7 and wait for Win9, or move on to OSX.
I too was anticipating the "XP is going to EOL billions of dollars of hardware" as a chance to recoup, but I now think it's not going to happen, for several reasons.
1. New hardware is CHEAP!
2. Most of those old systems are already being supplanted by combinations of tablets, pads, and smartphones.
Those old systems, with their old hardware, are going to be more expensive to upgrade than to just junk. Outdated (and expensive to upgrade) ram, PATA hard drives, motherboards and cpus that just don't cut it today, inefficient and noisy power supplies, lousy (by today's standards) video ... even going the "Oh well, we can always use it as a server" route, you'd mostly be better served just junking it and buying something new, just from an energy standpoint.
The only real market opportunity that I see at this point is finally porting all those old IE6 web apps. I think Microsoft has (most likely inadvertently) anticipated this by making their MetroUI html5+javascript-centric.
Bypassing the browser is also something that Apple and the various Linux desktops should be putting more work into. We can already do this to a certain extent in three ways - KDE allows for using web snippets (but it's buggy) and both Java and Flash allow programmers to write code that leverages html, css, and interactions with servers (oops, I forgot, it's now "Teh Cloudz!"), and if you really want to go to all that work, you can always "write your own implementation" from scratch using the technology of your choice.
Apps were a first step for many users in moving away from "in a browser" for net-centric applications other than email ... I fully expect the trend to continue, if only because it's simpler for the end user, and making things simpler for the end user means that they can concentrate on what they want to do, rather than how to do it.
If the various linux desktops don't do it, and do it properly, I expect to see them subsumed by Android on the desktop/laptop in 5 years.
I think that the "Window of opportunity" (pardon the pun) for Linux was Vista. If people don't like Win8, they'll just continue to run Vista (which is now more stable than many Linux desktop environments) or Win7 and wait for Win9, or move on to OSX.
I too was anticipating the "XP is going to EOL billions of dollars of hardware" as a chance to recoup, but I now think it's not going to happen, for several reasons.
1. New hardware is CHEAP!
2. Most of those old systems are already being supplanted by combinations of tablets, pads, and smartphones.
Those old systems, with their old hardware, are going to be more expensive to upgrade than to just junk. Outdated (and expensive to upgrade) ram, PATA hard drives, motherboards and cpus that just don't cut it today, inefficient and noisy power supplies, lousy (by today's standards) video ... even going the "Oh well, we can always use it as a server" route, you'd mostly be better served just junking it and buying something new, just from an energy standpoint.
The only real market opportunity that I see at this point is finally porting all those old IE6 web apps. I think Microsoft has (most likely inadvertently) anticipated this by making their MetroUI html5+javascript-centric.
Bypassing the browser is also something that Apple and the various Linux desktops should be putting more work into. We can already do this to a certain extent in three ways - KDE allows for using web snippets (but it's buggy) and both Java and Flash allow programmers to write code that leverages html, css, and interactions with servers (oops, I forgot, it's now "Teh Cloudz!"), and if you really want to go to all that work, you can always "write your own implementation" from scratch using the technology of your choice.
Apps were a first step for many users in moving away from "in a browser" for net-centric applications other than email ... I fully expect the trend to continue, if only because it's simpler for the end user, and making things simpler for the end user means that they can concentrate on what they want to do, rather than how to do it.
If the various linux desktops don't do it, and do it properly, I expect to see them subsumed by Android on the desktop/laptop in 5 years.
You seem to be missing something Barb
Posted by: hairyfeet 2011-10-30 00:06:32 In reply to: Barbie_H
And that is how WIDE the XP market was. We are talking high end single and dual core, laptops and netbooks, a heck of a lot of VERY nice systems came with WinXP. At the shop i'm already starting to see high end P4s and Athlon X2s and Pentium Ds, not to mention all the Mobile Pentiums and Turions.
the other thing you are missing is what folks do with their PCs, which frankly would play right into FOSS if someone would just get on the ball and make a Linux that was as friendly as Win 7 or even WinXP, and that is the net. they play Farmville, they go to Facebook, they use Gmail, now what part of that needs a crazy amount of RAM or multicores even? answer NONE, heck even the build that I call the "big standard XP box" which is a 2.2Ghz-3.6Ghz P4 with 512Mb of RAM and a 40gb HDD can run that!
Finally you are missing the fact that economy is in the toilet and folks are looking to save money ANY way they can! Sure YOU may have a nice top o' the line desktop, along with a laptop or netbook, but there are a lot of folks out there with only a single desktop that would like a second or a laptop to go with what they have. you can pick up a replacement battery for most model laptops from Amazon for around $30, which means there is a BIG market for cheap laptops! Heck here at the shop the sub $150 laptops go as fast as I can get them in!
But in the end it won't matter as the Linux community will just scream "We're leet!" and shoot themselves in the face. you have too many anti-social developers and trolls in positions of power that think ANYTHING that makes linux easier for the user is a betrayal of their "geek cred" like copypasta into a term suddenly makes them a hacker. it is this braindead boneheaded desire to feel superior to the masses that will leave Linux stuck in last place, simply because there isn't a Gates or Jobs to crack the whip and deal with the trolls. while RMS may think you can create a communist utopia as we have seen on unregulated forums no direction or control ends up with nothing but trolls and malcontents running the joint.
Sadly that is what I believe is wrong with Linux and simply won't be fixed. too many in the community look down their pimply noses at anyone who isn't a programmer and claim Linux as their own, and sadly too many developers only care about CLI and don't bother writing even a halfway functional GUI for their applications. if anything it has gotten worse with regards to factions and elitism and without serious direction from the top i doubt things will get better in time to make a difference. The masses will just ignore Linux because the geeks make sure to ignore the masses.
the other thing you are missing is what folks do with their PCs, which frankly would play right into FOSS if someone would just get on the ball and make a Linux that was as friendly as Win 7 or even WinXP, and that is the net. they play Farmville, they go to Facebook, they use Gmail, now what part of that needs a crazy amount of RAM or multicores even? answer NONE, heck even the build that I call the "big standard XP box" which is a 2.2Ghz-3.6Ghz P4 with 512Mb of RAM and a 40gb HDD can run that!
Finally you are missing the fact that economy is in the toilet and folks are looking to save money ANY way they can! Sure YOU may have a nice top o' the line desktop, along with a laptop or netbook, but there are a lot of folks out there with only a single desktop that would like a second or a laptop to go with what they have. you can pick up a replacement battery for most model laptops from Amazon for around $30, which means there is a BIG market for cheap laptops! Heck here at the shop the sub $150 laptops go as fast as I can get them in!
But in the end it won't matter as the Linux community will just scream "We're leet!" and shoot themselves in the face. you have too many anti-social developers and trolls in positions of power that think ANYTHING that makes linux easier for the user is a betrayal of their "geek cred" like copypasta into a term suddenly makes them a hacker. it is this braindead boneheaded desire to feel superior to the masses that will leave Linux stuck in last place, simply because there isn't a Gates or Jobs to crack the whip and deal with the trolls. while RMS may think you can create a communist utopia as we have seen on unregulated forums no direction or control ends up with nothing but trolls and malcontents running the joint.
Sadly that is what I believe is wrong with Linux and simply won't be fixed. too many in the community look down their pimply noses at anyone who isn't a programmer and claim Linux as their own, and sadly too many developers only care about CLI and don't bother writing even a halfway functional GUI for their applications. if anything it has gotten worse with regards to factions and elitism and without serious direction from the top i doubt things will get better in time to make a difference. The masses will just ignore Linux because the geeks make sure to ignore the masses.
The only thing Apple did that was different was spend a lot of money on advertising shiny, underperforming gadgets to insecure customers in need of hipness validation. Open source doesn't have the budget, it doesn't make shiny gadgets, and its userbase is secure in its nerd place.
They actually delivered.
Underperforming? One of my daughters has replaced her computer with an iPhone. That's not under-performing - that's disrupting the market!
It's been about half a year, and the end result is, if she ever feels she needs another computer, she's going to buy a Mac. Or an iPad. She's tried Windows, she's tried Linux, and she certainly knows what she doesn't want.
You're right about open source not having the budget - that's always been an Achilles heel, with no solution in sight. The active hostility of large segments of open source to anything that is "for profit", and refusal to learn from what works, doesn't help matters. I call them the "Open source for closed minds" camp, for obvious reasons.
Most people learn from their mistakes. Smart people learn from other people's mistakes - and from others' successes. We need more "smart" thinking - not in copying what they make, but in HOW they got to be so successful, because we don't have all the answers. Instead, we have too many extremists wrt "Not Invented Here."
There's a sentiment in the community that making things simpler equates to "dumbing down." That's not necessarily the case, and such thinking is a symptom of false elitism. It's also been the #1 turn-off for people trying open source. People want help, not being burned by an "RTFM or GTFO" attitude.
Rather than refusing to "dumbing down", we should look at opportunities to get out of the user's face so they can do what they want to do, rather than bit-twiddling the underlying technology.
Another equally silly thing we need to stop doing is the removal of features that people have grown used to, for the sake of theoretical "user interface guidelines." GNOME and Ubuntu are currently probably the biggest offenders, but there's more than enough blame to go around.
Underperforming? One of my daughters has replaced her computer with an iPhone. That's not under-performing - that's disrupting the market!
It's been about half a year, and the end result is, if she ever feels she needs another computer, she's going to buy a Mac. Or an iPad. She's tried Windows, she's tried Linux, and she certainly knows what she doesn't want.
You're right about open source not having the budget - that's always been an Achilles heel, with no solution in sight. The active hostility of large segments of open source to anything that is "for profit", and refusal to learn from what works, doesn't help matters. I call them the "Open source for closed minds" camp, for obvious reasons.
Most people learn from their mistakes. Smart people learn from other people's mistakes - and from others' successes. We need more "smart" thinking - not in copying what they make, but in HOW they got to be so successful, because we don't have all the answers. Instead, we have too many extremists wrt "Not Invented Here."
There's a sentiment in the community that making things simpler equates to "dumbing down." That's not necessarily the case, and such thinking is a symptom of false elitism. It's also been the #1 turn-off for people trying open source. People want help, not being burned by an "RTFM or GTFO" attitude.
Rather than refusing to "dumbing down", we should look at opportunities to get out of the user's face so they can do what they want to do, rather than bit-twiddling the underlying technology.
Another equally silly thing we need to stop doing is the removal of features that people have grown used to, for the sake of theoretical "user interface guidelines." GNOME and Ubuntu are currently probably the biggest offenders, but there's more than enough blame to go around.
