Linc wrote:See here's where I have to call bullshit. Anyone who has been using a computer for 10 years remembers the time when you *HAD* to use the command prompt. Those were the days of DOS still. Before that, it was better yet.
Now in those days, non technical people all over used someputers, at home, at work, in school, etc. No GUI's as far as the eye could see (at least *nothing* like thy are today. Back then your GUI might have been a graphical file manager or some such thing if you were lucky. Or maybe some fancy ansi graphics!
If people could do it then, they can do it now. Windows is just giving people an excuse to be computer retarded.
Well, if you're trained to use something, sure you would be able to figure it out, for example my mom can figure out PowerPoint because she took a course on it. To my experience, back 10 years ago, no one besides office workers and that type of people actually used computers, back then, gosh, my mom still sent hand written letters to people. Now I'm just talking about my experience here in Denmark, of course if you have a different one in the US, I respect that. 10 years ago in DK you would not find your typical housewife using a computer, not even for the most simple things, which was simple even back then, such as using Notepad to write a letter for someone. It's only in recent years it's becomes "popular" for those "regular" people to ow a PC here in Denmark, that's not to say that it hasn't been popular in the US or other places for even longer.
I agree with what you say about Windows giving people an excuse to be inexperienced, but let's look at that one for a sec, if you don't know much about computers, and you find something eaisier than something else, wouldn't you use that? Of course UNIX addicts (This should not be seen as a negative point) like you Linc wouldn't, because you like what you've got.
Right now we live in a Microsoft dominated world, and that's just a fact we will have to live with, and if people like the lazyness that Windows allows them to take, we can't make them come to Linux if we don't provide the same thing, because then people will just stay with Windows, of course some people will argue with me about that, and thank god for that, because I certainly would like reality to be different, but I'm basing my views on what I see with my own eyes.
Chess wrote:Along the same lines, here in my office, people still yearn for Wordperfect 5.1 in all its DOS glory but nope, we moved to MS Office XP and folks hate it. We also have a specialized piece of software here in the office and it has been DOS based since forever. Our staff loved it and it ran fine. Well, it was decided to "upgrade" to the newer GUI version and now they hate that too. They tell me that all the quick keystrokes are gone in favor of point and click GUI's and wizards. They said it's slower and crash-prone.
Go figure.
Well, it's a sign that people like what they're used to, and if they're used to commandprompts, obviously that's what they'd like to use. But if people are used to GUIs, then that's what they like to use. When Microsoft releases their new Office 2007, or whatever it's gonna be called, it will have a completely new interface, and then OpenOffice and folks like Sun who markets StarOffice, should use the argument that they offer what people are used to, and that they don't have to learn a whole new interface, and I bet ya you'll see exactly what you describe with Microsoft's next Office offerings.
Actually, GEOS was quite an amazing desktop environment. You could get quite a bit out of an 8-bit architecture back then. But, even to get GEOS going you needed to know LOAD "*",8,1 and then RUN.
