On Sun, 2 Oct 2005, Uri Even-Chen wrote:
Hi people,
I hope I'm not stepping on open wounds here, but I want to raise this
discussion. My father has a computer with Windows 98, and he asked me
to check it for technical problems. I told him that Windows 98 is old
and obsolete, so he should either upgrade to Windows XP or start using
Linux. My father instantly replied that he wants to have Windows. Also
at the office of his company, there are about 12 computers - all of them
using some version of Windows. I wonder how come most people &
companies prefer Windows - is it because they're already used to it, or
because they're afraid of changing, or because they want to use a
specific software which is not available on Linux, or because they want
to be like everyone else? Because most people I know, if they're not
computer geeks - use Windows. And most companies too. People even got
used to send documents in Microsoft Office format - even in business
related documents, legal documents etc. Windows & Microsoft Office have
become a de-facto standard.
What do you think?
Windows is first and foremost a great advertising success. All the
'relevant' parts of windows are those which are visible and interactive
and all the efforts of the company that makes it are concentrated in the
direction of *perceived* features. Not quality, not stability, but
chrome, 'ease of use' (as perceived by uneducated users who are clueless
as to what is needed to make a stable and reliable system!!!) and
features that were determined to be desirable by users from a panel and
from statistics. Since the resources of the company are limited, they
put them where the dollars are, and everything that is behind the
scenes, such as the important operating system principles and mechanisms
required to sustain this colored frontispice comes second. The people
who find this out the hard way are the administrators and system
operators who need to set up larger collections of windows machines. And
imho they did not even use their money so well. OS X, SGI and BeOS flew
hoops around the graphical aspects of the current offering from m$ imho.
All the hardware and software manufacturers who make products for the
'windows platform' ride this horse. Nice looks, features that are 'in',
and no or relatively little money for QA and interoperability testing.
This is the way money is made now in IT for the masses.
To understand why people prefer a brand over another you have to study
some marketing and advertising as well as marketing psychology.
In short, most people prefer to stay with what they already know best or
are used to. Computer geeks are not discussed here.
To make people change over and try something else, they have to either
have some trauma due to damage caused by or connected with the previous
product or be attracted to something new and different. Most people who
change over are of the first kind, only very few have the spirit of
adventure to try something new. One way to move the majority is to make
them feel or believe that they are using something obsolete or outdated
and that they are no longer a part of the majority because of that. This
is a carefully nurtured feeling, built up by advertising and feature
'scaling' (in software, older versions don't look as cool, have fewer
buttons, do not operate well with new file formats, etc). It causes
people who would not change otherwise to feel apart from the flock and
to wish to join the safety of the flock, and this is done by upgrading
the computer software. Since this aspect of marketing addresses the vast
majority of the users, upgrade-pushing is the most successful marketing
strategy in software in societies where people are not geeky and
interpid enough to seek out new challenges (and products) so often (or
often enough for the taste of moneycounting capitalists).
Also proprietary file formats and network protocols are usually
introduced as a 'foot in the door' movement, as an extension or
'improvement' to an existing protocol, distributed for free, and in the
hope that users will prefer to use default settings (always true), and
establish it as a de facto standard. This is the case with Java, m$
flavor dhtml, m$ flavor media files, office file formats and many other
things. It was also the case for the LZW algorythm unfortunately, and
there will be many more like this if developers will keep jumping into
the newest super-duper development environment on an as-they-come base.
So 'modified' 'improved' and so forth proprietary protocols and formats
are in fact trojan horses which attack the existing set of protocols and
formats with the purpose of imposing other, different standards. They
are very often disseminated for free, and have no immediate perceived
cost. It only appears later, when one is forced to upgrade every year or
two just to be able to open the documents sent by clueless business
partners by email.
I hope that I have put some points across here.
As to why people buy this crap advertising ? Mostly, people are
clueless. The advertisers tell them what they want to hear. If they do
not want to hear anything then they do not tell them anything. They play
them some catchy music which was approved by a panel and is guaranteed
to appeal to over 80% of the audience, and show them happy, smiling
people with nice haircuts wearing nice suits shaking hands in
association with nice cars and places, and of course an association with
the image of the product. Or images of sportsmen, of fighters, of all
that which they wish they were or were doing but aren't. The exact
opposite of what they see at work and in everyday life every day. Can
you see the upgrade psychological push here?
For example I do not watch TV (I do not own a TV ;-) ) but I like to
watch some advertising (!!). I look at the cinematography which is often
amazing, and learn about ever new plots to wiggle something into
people's subconscious.
So as a guy with a penguin problem, you cannot really compete with the
hypnotic effect of prime time TV, you have to wait for your moment in
privacy with the victim, preferrably when the victim is under stress due
to problems with the product you want him to replace/upgrade *your* way.
As to 'upgrading' to something better, with regard to Linux, I think
that the best way is to burn a recent copy of Knoppix and wait patiently
until the victim's computer crashes. Then go there, boot knoppix
(without touching the hdd), explain that they will have to reinstall the
other os since it's borked (again), save/email/whatever the files that
were all-important, open them in OO in knoppix, and give them the option
to keep the knoppix disk until the computer will be repaired or whatever
(after making sure they can connect to the internet, print etc). Oh, and
emphasize that the knoppix install is a demo and that it only gets
better and faster from there, and that is is free and legal, as opposed
to the Windows install which requires XXX money to fix (and a license of
course). BUT BE SURE TO SKIP ALL THE GEEK TALK AND EMPHASIZE ONLY HOW
EASY IT IS TO USE. Normal users are of two kinds, those whose eyes glaze
over after 30 seconds of geektalk and those who don't want to hear it in
the first place.
Peter (who took an introductory marketing course about 16 years ago and
is very glad that he did that)
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