A people problem
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| purplewizard Nov 02, 2006 8:28 AM EDT |
"governments have tended to stick with what they know" - this stuck out reading the article. I've just talked to my brother about a different thing and his employer has done a similar thing, opted for the product from the people they know (Microsoft). And it is that the company made the decision it is that people who are part of the company made the decision. Similarly in government I suspect the real trouble is that the numbers who know of alternatives to the proprietary straight jacket are much thinner on the ground than those knowledgeable about Free Software (even just open standards). And for that problem I just don't know if there is really a fix? |
| tuxchick Nov 02, 2006 8:32 AM EDT |
"And for that problem I just don't know if there is really a fix?" Yes. Remove all warning labels from everything and let natural selection do its job. |
| dinotrac Nov 02, 2006 9:20 AM EDT |
Part of the problem, I think, is that too many of us are so sure that we are right that we forget that others need to be convinced. We might be so caught up in "four freedoms" or "great uptime" that we forget about "Can I do the things I need to do?" "Can I learn it without losing too much time?" "Will it be easy to get help ?" etc, etc, etc. And then, the big one, "We've figured out how to do what we're doing, why change? What makes the pain worth our while?" It can be done. In fact, it is the bad boys up in Redmond who have shown us that. Once upon a time, Excel was a Mac spreadsheet and Microsoft Word was a significant word processor, but not the major player in a market that made room for names like WordPerfect, Wordstar, MultiMate, XyWrite, and more. On PCs, spreadsheets meant Lotus-1-2-3 and nothing else was close. So, what happened? Windows 3.0 happened, the first version of Windows that could more or less be used productively -- and -- that could multitask DOS apps. in fact, the irony of Windows 3.0- was that it used the hardware features of the 386 to properly mutlitask DOS apps with pre-emptive time-slicing while Windows apps used a far inferior cooperative mutli-tasking approach. Windows was thrown at the world, it was cheap, it was cute, and it could run the apps that people actually used. People started wanting Windows versions of their apps and... Well, it seems that Lotus and WordPerfect were busily creating OS/2 apps, but no Windows apps. Microsoft, eager monopolist-to-be that it was, offered dirt-cheap "competitive upgrades" and a license that let you install the software on one machine at the office and another machine at home. WordPerfect and 1-2-3 withered on the vine. The key is that people saw something they liked with Windows... a little bit of that Mac pointy-clicky stuff without the Mac price and without having to give up their software. We can't tell people what they should want, much as we would like to do that. We need to BE something they want. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!