Are We Window Users Imbeciles?

Everyone using Windows, including me, is not dimwitted, but I suspect that many are like me, and are very set in ways to do things. I like the revisions of Linux that are most “Windows like” without having the gripes I have with Windows itself.

So inertia plays a great part in things, as people are always reticent to change.

I suspect that, if we started a generation of users on Linux, as Mr Negroponte wanted to do originally, in 20 or so years Windows would find its marketshare shrink considerably.

Microsoft will endure, but their marketshare will slowly decrease, little by little, as Linux gets better, and people grow up being more accustomed to it, through other devices which use it.

Good morning Marc,
Thanks for dropping by. We all have gripes with Windows. But what is surprising with all of the gripes we have, we continue to use it. I may be blessed but I have been using Vista on my laptop since last November and have had no issues at all.

Have a good week and take care.

I think Stephenson hit it on the head when he said Linux was a free tank and Windows was a station wagon:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

Bullhorn: “But…”

Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

There’s a lot to be said for comfort. It took a while for people to get used to the idea of paying for a product that is basically information and the media didn’t really matter. It’s going to take them a while to get used to the idea of accepting free information that does (usually) more than what they can pay for from a company they’re comfortable with.

I don’t think Windows users are idiots. For the most part, they’re just people who don’t want to look under the hood of their vehicle and wouldn’t know what they were looking at if they did. (Which is one big reason Windows has so many security issues…if you don’t know how your computer works at a basic level, you can be pretty easily fooled into doing stuff you shouldn’t.) They’re often a lot more comfortable knowing that one of the biggest companies in the world made their “vehicle” and can (theoretically) fix it than they are with the idea that there’s a ton of people out there who will help them fix their own vehicle for free if it breaks.

With Windows you get all kinds of proof that there’s a company out there to help you. EULA’s and receipts and a million companies selling you things like undercoating (anti-virus) and ground effects (all kinds of neat applications). Linux is just getting to the point where you don’t have to look under the hood, and there’s not near as many people selling the accessories. It’s bound to make people accustomed to the trappings of a commercial software a bit wary about it’s reliability and ease of use.

That being said, it’d sure be nice if I could get some of the people in my life to accept that free tank, because they’re not the ones looking under the hoods of their station wagons, and there’s a lot more room for me to work under the hood of those tanks…;-)

“. Are we Imbeciles? I do not believe we are. In fact for the people who read and have associated themselves with Lockergnome, I have found you people very intelligent.”
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CT - well said.

Denny - no problem.

The biggest usability problem in Windows’ collection of $20,000 usability toilet seats if you ask me, would be how horrid the included applications are and how they’re almost impossible to extend and make useful.

Take Windows Media Player, garbage…technically I *can* get it to play modern codecs after I install ffdshow, CoreVorbis, MadFLAC, WavPACk, OptimFROG, and about a dozen others through the K-Lite Codec Pack, but then it can’t read their media tags.

So I go get some tag extender plug ins and now it can sort my library with a liberal amount of nudging, but Windows Explorer is still useless as a tag editor for these formats, so I need shell extensions, and if I’m using the 64-bit Explorer shell, they won’t snap in and work unless I swap to the 32-bit shell.

Around this time, I’ve installed about 40 megs of addons and WMP still can’t rip to anything but Windows Media and the antique reference implementation of MP3 at constant bitrate, so now I need a separate encoder program which will be another 10-15 megs.

By this time I may as well have just downloaded Winamp or something.

The Linux solution is far more elegant of course, I just get the codec packs for whatever media framework my players and encoders use, and it works, no big company behind it playing favorites or handicapping formats to prop up their own.

Maybe someone needs to tell Microsoft “It’s the modularity, stupid!”

I think a lot of these tripped out designs are there to try and impress people who would be confused by functionality.

I cannot agree with you 90 % of people have windows because they get it shoved down out troats… It took me 10 years to finally find linux and I can garantee you I am NOT GOING BACK!

Linux is now mature enough and simple enough that if most people get a chance to try it they will not need to ever see a command line interface… those day are long gone!

Ubuntu 9.04 10 times better that XP or even windows 7 and not to mention A LOT FASTER.
My computer boots is 30 seconds flat … try and do that with any version of windows!

For years now the corporate environment has been using Windows for everything that the end user sees. So the user learns to use Windows exclusively, then wants to use it at home.

When they go shopping for a computer, they preemptively rule out anything that is not Windows. The only exceptions to this are employees of companies that use Macs, and the hardcore IT people, who like exposure to and experimentation with the whole gamut of things.

Now the corporate environment is moving away from offering end users a desktop. We’re (IT folks) constantly being pushed to *try* to get users on thin (dumb) client devices, and do all the computing in the datacenter. If this trend continues, corporate end users in a few years will not be *used to* Windows anymore, and it will be a huge opportunity to sell them something different.

It will only require similar application “look and feel”, rather than complete desktop “look and feel” to satisfy them.

I said “in a few years.” That probably means, when WinXP is not available anymore.

Linux and Mac will never dominate for one very simple reason… the average computer user cannot go to walmart or best buy and buy software to run on it. End of story. And for those gamers out there who want to play the newest games… guess what, they are on Windows. Not Linux. Not Mac. I like windows. It works. I have used Linux, spent a lot of time reading documentation on how to tweak it just to where it worked right, and then sat back and thought… ok, now what? And having been in the PC repair business for 7+ years now, I can say with confidence that 99.99999% of all windows problems are caused by click happy users with fast internet connections. I just love those Mac commercials where the smug “Mac” sits there and tells people how trouble free his OS is…. they can only get away with saying that because so few people actually own a mac. Back when I was in school, all the computers were macs, and guess what? They crashed, froze, and broke down with madening regularity. Also, personally I found the OS the be completely un-intuitive. My personal opinion is that Mac is for Elitists, who want to say to everyone, “Look how much better I am than you.” Well, anyway, to each his own, but I just wish that all the problems that people have with PC’s weren’t laid at windows feet. A little personal resposibility for your own browsing habits would be nice, but the masses don’t even realize that it’s their own fault.