From the _Zen of Programming_ by Geoffrey James:
"Curse these personal computers!" cried the novice in anger, "To
make them do anything I must use three or even four editing programs.
This is truly intolerable!"
The master programmer stared at the novice. "And what would you do
to remedy this state of affairs?" he asked.
The novice thought for a moment. "I will design a new editing
program," he said, "a program that will replace all these others."
Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head.
"What did you do that for?" exclaimed the surprised novice.
"I have no wish to learn another editing program," said the master.
And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
I think the above parable is appropriate when comparing desktop
environments, especially from the end-user perspective. Most users
barely scratch the surface of the features included with their desktop
environment. In fact, from what I have seen, many features -- even
those specifically tagged as "user-friendly" -- tend to cause more
confusion than benefit.
This is not intended as a sleight against end users -- their expertise
often lies in other areas. It is instead reinforcement for what Ivar
said before. Users are malleable and can be trained to use JDS, KDE, or
whatever desktop environment suits. The bigger issue right now is can
the user perform all the tasks he or she needs to do? If the answer to
that question is no, then it makes little difference how good the
desktop environment is. (Compatibility is a threshold need, aka
dissatisfier, in the Kano model.)
Acrobat Reader has been mentioned several times on this list as a
linchpin issue. I think Acrobat Reader is important and improvements in
this area are good. But I personally feel that the stronger issues are
vertical market software support for business users and digital-media
peripheral support for broad consumer access.
-jerry
Ivar Janmaat wrote:
Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
Why is KDE not an option?
Well it isn't about KDE versus JDS.
It's about MS Windows versus JDS or KDE or Icewm or whatever you can
think of.
Eventually it boils down to what the end users expect (end users are
non technical users).
For our end users this means:
1. Dutch user interface
2. Dutch applications
3. Dutch help text
4. Dutch books and documentation
5. Their business applications need to work with word processor and
spreadsheet.
The last one is often the biggest issue. Form generators pull data out
of their databases to generate a forms in MS Word.
For some branches there are several applications which use VB scripts
to generate forms in Word which do not work in Open/Star office. As a
service provider you need a lot of resources and a software developer
who wants to invest in this in order to move away form MS Windows /
Office.
All these issues make it hard to really create a solid alternative to
the MS windows for now.
But hard does not mean impossible. There is some movement and I think
2007 we will be an interesting year.
Ivar
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