Peter's comments are correct. However, the average low-end - not power
MS Office / XP user - relates to Windows in a generic way. In other
words, Windows in KDE is still Windows and OO is still Office.
danny
Peter wrote:
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)
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Danny Lieberman
Visit us at http://www.software.co.il
Office + 972 8 970-1485
Cell + 972 54 447-1114
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
