5) Vista a Problem?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by eldavojohn
Do you view Vista as a threat to your user base? Do you or people on your
team ever change your mind about things or let looming Vista influence
your decisions?
I'm hoping that Linux distros are not pressured into adding unneeded bells
and whistles in a desperate attempt to compete with Vista. Are you
invulnerable from this mentality?
It's not about competing with Vista. Trying to match Vista one-for-one
for features is a game we can not win. Not only do we not have the same
single focus mentality that Microsoft can bring to the table, but it
also allows Microsoft to set the rules of the game.
I think that we should be looking for ways to change the rules of the
game to make it possible for us to win. You need to ask youself the
questions: what can we do that Microsoft would be unwilling to do? What
are our strengths, and what can we bring to the table? How can we take
their greatest asset - Microsoft Windows - and turn it into their
greatest liability?
In our world, software is free. Both in terms of cost but also in terms
of how we can give it to other people. But why is it so hard for us to
install software? Now, some might say that dpkg and rpm make it easy,
but in reality, it doesn't. It requires going out to a server, the
software is packaged up in a way that requires system access to a
machine to install and - frankly - I don't think we've changed the game
in this area as well as we could have. Why is it that if I had a piece
of software on my machine that I can't just give it to the guy next to
me? Why is it that it's so hard to make a change to a piece of software
and then make that change available to someone else? We talk about
diversity, but we actually abhor it. Our tools make it hard to enjoy
the very freedoms that we hold dear.
And last, we have spent years building a desktop system that is
basically a clone of the windows and apple monopolies. We cherry pick
features we like and we re-implement them, often poorly and not well
integrated. But in doing so, we're letting the other guy define what
our experience is and we are willing to allow others to define out basic
interactions. Once again, what can we do that the others can not? We
can let the communicate directly with each other. Each of the other
guys cares about making themselves an intermediary, because then they
"own" the customer and they can make money off the inevitable
transactions. But we don't have to do that. So we can provide a more
pure, safe and friendly experience. But we don't. We end up writing
programs that let us use their networks to talk to each other, and
poorly at that.
And we're not willing to try out new experiences for the desktop.
Gimme, OLPC and other desktop metaphors are the closest we have, but we
usually fail to embrace them fully. We're not going to win by making a
better Windows than Windows. But what we can do is change the rules and
make them chase us instead of the other way around.
--Chris
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