As I already explained in the first Usability Terms article, consistency goes a long way in ensuring a pleasurable user experience in graphical user interfaces. While some user interfaces appear to be more graphically consistent than others, Windows has always appeared to be worse than most others – probably because it carries with it stuff that dates back to the 16bit era. IStartedSomething agrees with this, and started the Windows UI TaskForce.The idea is simple: list your pet graphical inconsistency in Windows Vista, describe it, provide a possible solution, and Long Zheng will make sure they get passed on to someone at Microsoft who is known for “getting things done”.
Most of us who use Windows Vista have probably come across a couple of user-interface quirks during our times – some of which irritate you more than others, some are more obvious than others. With the development of Windows 7 speeding full-steam ahead, I thought this might be an opportunity as good as ever to make these problems known to Microsoft and hopefully get them all resolved.
He started the list by himself, but since then it has expanded quite a bit already, and additions are being made continuously. Most of the complaints are minor, like aliased text where it should be antialiased or XP-style icons scattered throughout Vista. Some, however, are far more serious like the completely unusable “Safely remove hardware” dialog (whoever came up with that one deserves a spanking with USB cables), and the Windows 3.x-style (!) “Add fonts” dialog.
Some of them have already been fixed in Windows 7, and have been marked as such. In other words, your voice is being heard. Make use of this power, and help everyone by making the Windows graphical user interface a little more consistent. On behalf of all consistency freaks out there, I salute you.
Of course, first post your pet inconsistencies here in our own comments’ section, and feel free to go beyond Windows and dive into other environments too.
If this were Slashdot, the story would be tagged with “goodluckwiththat”
There are some amazing UI blunders in *all* OSes, and I find them a joy to browse through so I found this a really nice article to read.
I don’t really have a problem with the Windows UI from the point of view of consistency. It’s the apps that are the problem. Everyone loves to write horrible non-standard UIs for Windows, especially the antivirus and firewall people, and just about every little utility that comes with hardware.
Unfortunately that can’t be solved by Microsoft.
You know, it’s the same with websites.
You have a bunch of varying UIs with the same basic principals but not really following any set methods very well. Why don’t we see more people whining about websites being different?
Seems like a lot of developers, at least for windows apps, treat their UIs like website designers treat their sites. I’ll do it *my* way and make the UI interesting and not some bland normalcy
I agree completely about hardware utilities.
For example, motherboard manufacturers: when are they going to realize that not all people buying their products are 12 year olds that want a “cool” (see: http://marbleorchards.com/DigiPics/Easy%20Tune%20Specs.jpg ) looking app to monitor fan speeds, temperatures or set fsb. A simple, plain, elegant window with some tabs would be much better – one that you can minimize to tray and doesn’t take 5 seconds to display and 30MB of ram because of all those useless bitmaps it has to load.
I just hope they haven’t fixed bug 6 the same way as number 1. It will be more of a pain each time I have to use Windows if they remove the classic skin.
About number 1, I feel sorry for it, they should have kept it somewhere as an Easter egg. Or at least release the source if it still exists.
EDIT: On the other hand, edlin and debug were killed too. The terrorists have won.
Edited 2008-06-01 16:28 UTC
Linux has about 12+ UI toolkits, most of them themable, and many programs doesn’t even use one of these toolkits. Those who do go to great lengths oto ensure that the default settings are overridden ( http://my.opera.com/tsg1zzn/blog/2008/05/17/did-they-even-read-the-… ).
Who’s inconsistent here?
This link has nothing to do with Linux, that comment is a troll.
Edited 2008-06-01 17:43 UTC
Call me a cynic,but I understand fully why people give of their time to improve open source software as you are contributing to a common good (I am using the term good here in its economic sense). More importantly, one that nobody can take away, but why would any one freely give of their time to contribute to the bottom line of one of the world’s largest companies?
Let Microsoft do its own homework. The day it releases its operating system under an open source license, I will be the first to line up to help.
Because it is what is used by the vast majority of the worlds population?
yes, and if they want it to CONTINUE TO BE USED by a majority they should take the time and effort to improve their product themselves instead of spending so much time adding in DRM which their customers don’t even want.
What does that have to do with anything? We were talking about helping out the product team of a commercial company…
That’s rule 23 of OSAlert, I’m afraid: if a post mentions Microsoft in any way, shape, or form then 65% of all comments *must* contain comments that would have been considered “old meme” 5 years ago (65% is a minimum).
This is actually completely amazing me. It is completely out of context in any way, shape or form from either the parent comment (mine) or the original article. Someone literally clicked the comments section, completely ignored both the link, summery, and virtually every other comment on the page. He then proceeded to write something which might be considered mildly insightful if it WERE taken in the right context, and it was still 2006.
That is bad enough, what blows my mind is that there were 3 other people who saw something completely inane, but noticing it had Microsoft and DRM in the same paragraph, decided it was clever, and voted it up.
I remember when we used to make fun of the slashdot readership. Guess what guys, we have become yet another gibbering horde of idiots.
Sadly, that sort of thing has become the rule rather than the exception here. The standard seems to be: either you’re rabidly, dogmatically opposed to everything that Microsoft does – or – prepare to be labeled a Microsoft shill.
Often times, the comment score is only useful as a measure of how strongly the echo chamber effect is in a particular comment thread.
The truly amusing part is that there are posters here who appear to be steadfastly-convinced that OSAlert is absolutely crawling with Microsoft advocates. Anyone who believes that should seriously head over to the ArsTechnica “Battlefront” forum and look up the posting histories of folks like PeterB, Paul Hill, seta, Venture, EvilMerlin, or pdampier (who is in fact an employee of Microsoft).
I think we are still doing somewhat better than that. We squabble and we argue. And yeah, there is more talking and less listening going on these days. But I have a hunch that there is still hope for us.
I put on an asbestos suit every time I post a comment
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp
lol
BTW, to the person who modded me now: thank you, I could not have asked for any more effective proof of my point.
I agree with you. I’d rather see a community improve something which is OWNED by the community instead of them helping a big company which has done pretty much everything it could to hurt innovation – and in that sense, that same community. And as a psychologist, I well know past behavior is often the best predictor of future behavior.
Maybe I’m extreme, but I think it’s bad to support proprietary software in any way. I think the whole concept is bad for humanity. Information and knowledge should be free, and by extend should the infrastructure on which it is transported and spread.
If you feel so strongly that all ideas and knowledge should be free, and also all software should be free please back it up with your actions in your profession: do what you trained for and spent lots of time and energy and money to acquire for free, and only for free. What, you can’t do that? Ok, then stop insisting others must give things away for free!
Now, if you want to help a proprietary company make something that’s better for end-users, sometimes you have to tell them “Hey, this sucks, I’d like this better, because it makes more sense to me!” and sometimes you honestly can’t expect to get anything out of it besides the personal satisfaction that at least you made your wants/needs clear to the company(s) in question. Of course, it is entirely possible that their wants/needs and yours don’t coincide: to which I reply, go back to the Open Source Software you support, and support it by doing what’s needed to make it the way you want it. Of course, there’s lots of things that aren’t available for free, because there hasn’t been enough interest in those that would do things for free to bother with it. In the end, everything that exists has a price: you just get to decide what price you’re willing/able to pay, and perhaps whom has to pay it, as it isn’t always a one-sided deal as to the people that pay the price.
Note: developers are part of the infrastructure of which you speak: this ties it back to the put-up-or-shutup dare. I think OSS is great, and those that voluntarily contribute to it are great for doing it, but in no manner would I insist that they do it on any other than their own agreed-upon terms. If they are lucky enough to get paid to do it, everyone wins, but demanding it be truly free in all senses is unfair.
Edited 2008-06-01 21:47 UTC
Not necessary, really. Red Hat has managed this better than anyone else. They do not work for free. And yet they do manage to keep ideas and knowledge free. It is a delicate balancing act, to be sure, Jonathan. But they have managed it. We need to consider how this beneficial strategy can be proliferated. No one should have to work for no gain. But to be able to work for everyone’s gain is a privilege. I do not have the answer. But I think about it every day. Maybe someday I will.
I believe that Superstoned does contribute hard work to the KDE project. I respect him for that.
Clearly, those that are using Windows and want certain things “fixed” (I put that in quotes because many of the things listed in the article aren’t bugs, but are requests), have an incentive to report said issues. Who are you to tell them not to do that, or look down on them for doing it? You don’t think it’s worthwhile to report problems in Windows (because it’s not OSS or whatever)? Fine, then don’t. That’s your choice. But it’s others’ choice to go ahead and report the problems they find. Your calling these people saps for reporting problems with a closed source product is akin to a closed source dev calling an open source dev a sap for working for free to enrich the pockets of the investors and execs of a company that distributes the resulting OSS product. That’s what you sound like when I read your self-righteous, self-congratulatory post.
I get the feeling that what really upsets you about this is that you hate Microsoft (you’ve said as much in your post), and therefore *want* their products to suck and can’t abide any effort to improve their products undertaken by those that use said products.
Oh, and save the self-righteous “owned by the community” bull. The people reporting these UI problems aren’t necessarily developers, they are users. And non-dev users aren’t part of the “community” that “owns” OSS. For example, I and most I know use Firefox, an open source product, but none of us feel that we are in some “community that owns” Firefox, anymore than we’d feel that we “owned” Opera, IE, or any other closed-source browser. That’s because we don’t give a damn that the code is OSS. It’s just another product.
One last thing: This article has nothing to do with OSS advocacy or your anti-Microsoft crusade. Every time a Microsoft article is posted here, the haters come out of the woodwork to spout the usual lines on how Microsoft sucks and how some OSS alternative is better or the OSS “philosophy” is better, or some other claptrap. When an Linux article is posted, you almost NEVER see some Windows fanboy derailing the thread with anti-Linux BS or pro-MS advocacy. To put is simply: This article is NOT about you. It’s about Windows users that want to improve it. Not everything is about you. You want to advocate OSS? Then do it in an appropriate article rather than derailing every single Microsoft article’s thread with pro-OSS anti-Microsoft bilge.
Edited 2008-06-02 01:11 UTC
It’s not about hate for MS or any other company making and selling proprietary software. Many are decent and are doing a great job. But I sincerely believe the businessmodel behind proprietary software is bad for society. When I write Free, I’m not talking about free but Libre. Not free beer but freedom of thought. The freedom to aquire, share and develop knowledge which can help people. The freedom of political expression. The freedom to do with whatever hardware you bought whatever you want. The only restraint on human freedom should be another person’s freedom – no more, no less.
Economically speaking, proprietary software has a tendency to lead to a monopoly. Every economist can tell you – a marginal cost of zero leads to a monopoly. And almost every economist will tell you a monopoly is bad. It raises prices, lowers efficiency and kills innovation. Maybe not immediately, but in the end, it’s what happens.
Socially speaking, proprietary software developers have a financial incentive to limit the freedom of their users. They don’t HAVE to do it, sure. Some will, some won’t. But as long as there is that incentive, as soon as a small company grows into a big company, it becomes more and more likely to happen. And I think that’s dangerous, as we slowly begin to depend more and more on computersoftware to express ourselves, to share information, knowledge and art.
So I think economical freedom, the free market economy, is good for people. I also believe personal and political freedom are good for people. Therefore I believe proprietary software is bad for humankind in the long run. Which is why I promote Free Software (Linux/BSD/KDE/Gnome), Free Culture (Blender/Magnatune/Creative Commons) and Free Knowledge (Wikipedia & friends).
MollyC said:
And then superstoned said:
It is not hard to see which of you is letting her hatred get the better of her in this thread.
Edited 2008-06-02 06:43 UTC
Et tu, sbergman27?
You’re confusing “hatred” with “frustration”. Just once, I’d like to read a Microsoft article on this site without the corresponding thread getting derailed by anti-Microsoft posters into unrelated anti-Microsoft/pro-ABM issues.
I can’t even read an article on this site about some new Microsoft product without someone piping in to say, “That’s nothing; XYZ company (that most never heard of) did the same thing ten years ago in product ABC (that nobody ever heard of)”, thus derailing the thread into who did what first rather than talking about the product itself.
This type of thing goes on and on and on.
Regrading this specific article, the “all information wants to be free, and therefore all software that is used to convey information must be free” argument has nothing to do with this article, and is yet another instance of derailing a Microsoft thread into sideshows.
As for “letting it get the better of me”, yes, after the 1000th time seeing a Microsoft article derailed by some anti-Microsoft holier-than-thou utopianist, I let it get the better of me and let off some steam.
Edited 2008-06-03 17:08 UTC
//Therefore I believe proprietary software is bad for humankind in the long run. Which is why I promote Free Software (Linux/BSD/KDE/Gnome), Free Culture (Blender/Magnatune/Creative Commons) and Free Knowledge (Wikipedia & friends).//
OK … so … how does Microsoft’s existence prevent you from doing/using any of that? I’m confused. I thought Linux/OSS was growing every year?
Well, MS creates proprietary software. As I said, I think proprietary software is bad, and it should go as soon as possible. Preferably before governments give in to the pressure for making FOSS illegal; or take advantage of it to limit the freedom of their citizens.
I am interested in your opinion on how to make sustainable products that are specialized.
Open Source and Free Software is very good at producing low level software and software for the general public. However, I don’t think that it is a good business model for niche products that very few developers can actually contribute to.
This is something that Free Software developers to this day still have not acknowledged: that there exists other business models than their own. This hurts the advancement of Free Software.
I’m not saying I’ve got answers to all questions, but generally, even rather specialized software can be build on FOSS. Besides, if it’s really specialized, companies have to write it themselves anyway… You might know 95% of the money (that statistic is – well, rather random, btw, it might as well be 90 or 99%) being made in software development is made on custom software. Only 5% of the business depends on the whole concept of proprietary software, and I believe most of them could find a business model based on FOSS.
An if they can’t?
I think you need to get out more in companies that depend on proprietary apps. These products are never going to be written as FOSS apps, simply because there are no developers that can do it.
These apps might be rewritten to use the cloud as software-as-a-service – using FOSS tools – but don’t force anyone to open source everything. Why force a GPL monopoly? It sounds catastrophic.
Right, it is rather extreme. As I said, I wouldn’t propose to introduce such a law anytime soon. But I think in the future it would be possible without too much dificulties. By the way, currently it looks rather the other way around – proprietary software vendors are often lobying hard to get laws which hinder or forbid FOSS some way or another.
And even though I don’t want to see companies go bankrupt – I’m sorry, but that’s life. If you don’t adapt, you die.
that is a very simplistic way to look at things.
First off, there is domain specific software (for example, ERP/Workflow for the apparel industry). There is a big enough market to build a business on it, but chances are you will have 3-4 clients (albeit, all fortune 500). This type of software is almost always proprietary, especially in submarkets where they haven’t really embraced technology.
Then there is framework software, like SAP or Business Objects. These are big generic frameworks that a business will buy, and then hire a small team to customize it to their needs. These companies are huge.
Then you have library/component companies. It doesn’t make sense to pay someone who has a general skillset for a hundred hours of work at 20$/hr to deliver something of less quality then a product that is available for 200$ developed by people who specialize in that product. An example of this is http://demos.devexpress.com/ASPxGridViewDemos/GroupingSorting/Group…, which I used while I was freelancing. I actually made sales thanks to that component, and it is just plug and play, leaving me to focus on things that the client is actually paying me to focus on.
Lastly, you have infrastructure companies like IBM/MS/Sun/Oracle/etc. As good as MySQL is for small projects, it is not remotely in the same calibur as Oracle, Sql Server, DB/2 or Sybase. There are also things that simply do not exist in the open source space (like BizTalk, Commerce Server, etc)
The first two types could theoretically become an open source project, but most companies which are not IT centric do not want to deal with any of the issues around even helping to manage a project like that. You see open source efforts pop up now and then, but they rarely come close to competing in a serious way.
The third can sometimes be open source, but when I want a good component, I want it to be slick. Most open source software looks like garbage, especially in the component space. While a client may say they want function over form, as I mentioned before I have made sales on the demo-ability of ASPxGridView.
The fourth has some open source options, but is still mostly commercial. For years open source has meant “not for production”, however that view has been changing thanks to IBM and Google. Even if you see someone running a linux server in an enterprise setting, chances are they have Oracle and some sort of propriatary appserver on it as well.
All that to say, you can’t write off the enter enterprise market as “well, that is all done in house”. It is actually only a very small percentage, and even then it is usually tying big propriatary tools together.
Hmmm. But don’t you think most money is made on customizing stuff? Sure, that ‘stuff’ is now proprietary, but in many cases it wouldn’t make a huge diff if it was OSS. My company uses iProcess, a pretty neath product – and I’m also pretty sure it wouldn’t make any difference if it was OSS – they would buy it anyway. Good support is crucial in the business, right? And the ideas behind FOSS make that even stronger.
But yeah, in the current market forcing the GPL would be bad. It will take time (and support from governments) for it to become more accepted, to get companies to learn to work with it. Then it will work.
BTW I don’t think FOSS needs to depend on volunteers at all – companies can develop it together like is being done on the linux kernel and Apache. Not many volunteers there, but it works. Think Open Innovation.
Whether they would use it or not is not so much the issue as who would write it.
I disagree with this violently. The GPL is a very restrictive license with very strong politics behind it. As things stand now, noone is forcing to buy into the system, so we still have a relatively free market. As it stands now, there is nothing to prove the system produces better products in every case, in fact if anything we can see that whether its a good idea or not is very situational.
Not only that, but you can count the profitable OSS companies on one hand, even though oss products exist in almost every sphere at this point. What you want to happen would basically mean that instead of rewarding innovation, we would force people into a system where they have to give their work to anyone who wants it. Again, if you want to do that, go for it, and it even makes sense in certain scenarios. But forcing people into that kind of system is basically communism, which has been proven multiple times to be a horrible failure.
Honestly, legistlating open source to me is even worse then things like software
Again, that works in some cases, but not every one. Both linux and apache are low level products that are needed by virtually every company on the planet. An ERP/Workflow system for the apparel industry is only needed by a handful. They don’t want to deal with hiring, management, etc. They want to buy a product and get support for said product, with as little investment on their part as possible.
In certain markets I could see it working, but in others, it totally would not.
As for open innovation, that is the whole point of universities. Innovation for the sake of innovation comes from publicly subsidized institutions to move the field as a whole forward. Market driven innovation and practical implementation is in the realm of business. That is the way we work. One is not more important then the other, both serve needs and both are better in some aspects and worse in others.
If a several parties are willing to pay a company to support a certain program, that company has an interest in improving the program. Through their support and by direct development (which also gives them other advantages like closer contact with the community, reputation, inside knowledge and an influence on the direction of the project) they will improve the program. Several companies exist utilizing this business model, think about KDAB but there are many others. This really works pretty well.
It is true that the value of the GPL has not been proven everywhere – but I don’t see how the GPL is so restrictive. It’s only restriction is that the whole piece of software written under it must allow the receiver to do whatever he/she wishes with it. Now that’s the idea of selling pretty much anything anywhere, why wouldn’t that work for software…
Ok, that’s a little naive, but I think you get my point. For generic software, a community can develop it easily. For very specific software, charge for each line of written code… Nothing in the GPL forbids you to ask money for the code, you just can’t prevent the receiver to redistribute it if they wish.
I think the sofware world could get used to it.
Now you are exaggerating. Firstly, there are many more profitable FOSS companies, many are just small. That’s because FOSS as a businessmodel leads to many small companies (like in the barber/hairdresser business) instead of a few large ones (like in the oil refining business). And nobody is supposed to give his work away – you can charge whatever you like, but generally speaking you can charge for each line of code just once. Unless you make a deal with a few companies to write something for all of them… Plenty other ways around, I suppose.
Now, why would a software consultancy company not be able to supply such a product? Building upon FOSS, working perhaps with similar companies in other regions, they could produce and sell such a product. Doesn’t have to be proprietary for that – as you said, companies don’t want to have to deal with hiring, management etc – they want support, some company which takes care of things. Problem solved, as money is paid for FOSS.
Perhaps. As I said before, I don’t think it would be good to mandate it now, but I certainly think the future might lead to a situation where the dominant business model is OSS.
Hmmm. You might wanna read up on Open Innovation. The discussion would be rather unfair if you didn’t, as I actually did research in a dutch research institute into the subject
You have a point, large innovations, the basics, should come from universities, smaller ones from companies. But also (or especially) for smaller innovations, Open Innovation as a strategy is an incredibly powerful way to make a company more innovative. Think about things like Crowdsourcing, but also cooperation between companies creating things like the Senseo (Philips & Douwe Egberts) or Beertender (Heineken & Krups).
In a domain specific application, how will the result be any different then the current model, other then each company is slightly more hands on?
The problem with the GPL is the ability to resell. That isn’t an issue in some areas, but in others it is a very big deal.
Read the Magic Caudron by ESR. It is basically the practical commercial application of his Cathedral and the Bazaar paper. He is (obviously) very biased towards as much open source as possible, but he talks about how some software should be open, some shouldn’t and some parts should be open but others shouldn’t. There are many domains where you lose any competitive advantage by open sourcing certain bits.
Here at my company we have a team of 12 guys (including co-ops) and we have several lisences for commercial products. Let’s take Regex buddy as an example. This is hands down the best software of its kind in existance, nothing else comes close. You can see here, they charge 40$ for a single license, 500$ for a 20 user license.
In a GPL world, why would our company buy a 20 user license? It would be a waste of money, and there is nothing JGSoft could say about it. What is to stop me from bringing in my personal copy, and passing it around? What is to stop me from sending it to my buddy who works in a different company? What is to stop the myriad products which do the same thing, just worse from copy/pasting the good bits from regex buddy, making it not worth buying? What is to stop me from making a tools compilation cd, and charging money for that, and not giving them any back?
GPL would kill them as a company. Now, doing a basic version of the software is fairly trivial, and not something people would mind giving away for free (and many people have done just that) But these people have taken it to the next level, and made a product that is worth buying for any developer. The reason they put that work in is that they knew they could control distribution and charge for it. If they didn’t know that, they never would have bothered, and the world of regex writing would be that much more of a bleaker place.
That, my friend, is exactly what happened in communist countries. When you do not have a guaranteed reward for your innovation, and you have right to any innovation anyone else makes, most people just don’t bother.
Again, I am not saying there is no place for the GPL sphere of software. I am just saying it is not the only place, and that its application in the market should determine where those places are, not government legislation.
More competition
Maybe, maybe. I’m not thinking as black & white as I sometimes write
You are hereby skipping over some advantages of FOSS:
– not everything has to be written from the ground up. In proprietary software, of someone wants to have a competitor to Regex buddy, it will have to be written from scratch (or close to that). The FOSS version will slowly improve – but never stop improving as long as someone works on it. Result is much less resources needed at any given point in time. I consider Regex Budy something rather common – I think it would get written if FOSS was normal, the common way of thinking. That’s also something holding it back right now – many companies pay for writing small tools they use, but they never think of releasing it as GPL. Despite the fact there are advantages for doing so (sharing maintenance, incorporating improvements from others etc). This would be a way a FOSS Regex Budy could come into existence and prosper
By the way, as Psychologist, I feel the urge to respond to this. Money has proven to be a horrible motivator. Really. ppl think it influences them, but in reality, it’s much like drugs. You need more and more to have an effect. Meanwhile, respect from colleagues and clients, a challenging environment, ability to make decisions etc are much more important for satisfaction. Hence the millions who participate in charities one way or another. Don’t think the fact ppl didn’t get money for what they worked for was the reason communism didn’t work. It wasn’t. (didn’t help, though, as the amount of money you make is often a status symbol, of course, and it matters in that way. But it’s not very important)
Ok, let’s agree for now, then
I still believe somewhere in the future we could have a fully GPL software world. But for the next 20 years – I don’t count on it either.
//As I said, I think proprietary software is bad, and it should go as soon as possible. //
Ummm …. ok? There are lots of things in life “that should just go away” but they won’t. You can wish in one hand and poop in the other, and see which happens first.
Edited 2008-06-02 16:43 UTC
Hehe, didn’t know that one. But yeah, you are right of course, things don’t go as one wants them to. Part of the freedom we enjoy
First, Microsoft also creates open source software.
Second, lots of companies create closed source software, not just Microsoft. Have you ever injected your OSS advocacy into threads about articles regarding non-Microsoft closed source software (thus, derailing the thread)? Didn’t think so.
Not often. I do often use the example of Flash being evil (that’s not MS but Adobe), and I also mention WordPerfect who did their share of nasty stuff trying to keep MS from kicking their asses back in the nineties. So it’s just natural MS learned from their tricks and used the MS Word format to keep their dominance for a long time. And what about Apple and the tricks surrounding their iPods and iTunes?
I must confess I consider MS especially evil, but I also think it’s just the way proprietary software business works.
Let me guess. You’re, like, 12, right?
You mean anyone over 12 can not dream about a better world? I thought that one generally got numb around 45…
Anyway, thanks for the compliment. Unfortunately I’m not as brilliant as you seem to think – having finished my study Psychology at 27… I wish I was smart enough to work as a businessconsultant at 12
Dreaming stupid dreams is still stupid, no matter how you slice it. FOSS software emerged out of a desire to create alternatives to commercial software — not to replace it. Having BOTH commercial and free software is a good thing: It promotes healthy competition and ensures that things keep moving forward. Take away one or the other, and you take away the incentive to innovate quickly. I know you WANT to believe that FOSS would keep innovating at the pace that it’s going but, having been in this industry for awhile, I can tell you that people wouldn’t be as interested, if they didn’t have any competition. It’s human nature. Monopolists tend to rest when they have the luxury to do so. Microsoft is the perfect foil — it’s rich, powerful, and pervasive — and it provides all the incentive that people need. Doubt it? Read the threads here on osnews, and you will see how much time is consumed with discussions of what MS is doing, what they’re thinking, and who’s doing something to counter them. That conflict is the engine of change. If you want the engine to function, you need to feed it — and feeding it requires serious competition between FOSS and commercial software.
Hmmm, I see your point. But wouldn’t the competition within the FOSS community keep things going? For example, see KDE vs Gnome?
I don’t think the competition between KDE and Gnome comes anywhere near to the competition between FOSS and Microsoft. It’s hard enough for people to get passionate about software — but they DO get passionate when they perceive that companies ignore or subtly change the interpretation of standards, require complicated licensing, charge high prices, intentionally thwart competitors, wave patents in their faces, etc. Nothing stirs the passions more than hatred. Even if that hatred is misplaced.
Edited 2008-06-05 09:06 UTC
As a economist I have to correct you slightly: To develop software has *not* a marginal cost of zero. Because if you hand out more copies of your products you have a much larger user base to support and this produces costs. Even if you have the counter argument that they do not sell support — which they certainly do — you have to respect a larger user base because of existing competition and long term involvement in the market.
By the way a monopoly does not have to be bad. There are certainly some goods that profit from a monopoly. For example the production of money.
The real question that arises is: Is a monopoly in SW production bad, if it is done for free software or information in general as it is done for printing money. I find this somehow interesting.
thank you, you are of course right. Though the support MS offers isn’t well known for it’s quality
I certainly think a monopoly in SW is bad – you read my statements regarding the social implications. If you look at it from an economical standpoint, less innovation & higher prices would be (and are and have been, in this case) the result. By mandating the GPL as only legal license for software, the government would magically turn the software market from a market were someone almost naturally gains a monopoly into a market in which a monopoly is unlikely. Of course, such an event would be far too disruptive, so I’m not actually advocating it. But imho – it should be the target. It would result (I believe) in lower prices, better services and more innovation. Now the last thing might not be solely because proprietary sofware is bad for innovation but at least partly because MS is notoriously bad at it (they are well known for not having an R&D department until well in the nineties).
Apple, for example, does a much better job at it with far less resources. Meanwhile, both companies/situations are extremes, and in general I don’t think you disagree that innovation doesn’t benefit from a monopoly.
Your logic is backwards. If people are paying to use Windows, isn’t it better if Microsoft asks them what they don’t like and how to improve it? It’s not that Microsoft can’t or doesn’t want to spend the money, but it’s better to get user input and make decisions based on that.
Besides, if you take maybe 10 minutes to type up what you don’t like and how to improve it, what’s the big f–king deal?
This is Microsoft trying to actually do it’s homework.
What difference does the license make to people that just want to use an improved OS? Serving up recommendations for improvements helps them just as much as it does people who recommend improvements for GNU-ish projects.
That is such a really, really great idea. now why did someone else not think of that…
oh hold on, they did….
it just took forever for some one at microsoft to listen to use end users, who know nothing what so ever about an OS, even though we use it on a daily basis.
AFAICT, Long Zheng is not from Microsoft. I have no idea how he knows what has been fixed for Win7 and what has not been fixed. I do hope someone from the UX team is paying attention, thought.
Strange that Microsoft would need their customers to find remaining Win 3.1 Dialogs… it can’t really be that no one at Microsoft found those, can it? Do Microsofts developers care so little for their products?
I can’t believe they would be so incompetent not to even come to the most obvious of conclusions, like make the darn System Dialogs resizeable or remove HIG-raping Win 3.1 garbage… so they seemingly just don’t care.
That was the overall Impression i had when trying Vista: “We don’t care” – and neither do i anymore. I do not expect less than an complete and *horrible* failure of Windows 7 and i think it would be a good thing too: Microsofts monopoly doesn’t look that much of a mountain anymore.
Yes, it has purely to do with incompetence and nothing to do with resources. In case you didn’t know, Microsoft pays the people that work there. Even with all the money they have, they only have a finite amount of resources.
Do some of you people even think before you post or do you just start typing away whatever comes to your brain?
Edited 2008-06-01 22:24 UTC
Do some of you people even think before you post or do you just start typing away whatever comes to your brain?
The answer to that is No and Yes, respectively.
I don’t think you know a thing about programming. The remaining Win3.1 dialogs are very scarce on functionality and even if they where as complex as the fixed size system dialogs… it is the functionality that is the vast majority of the work, making *all* those dialogs resizable can’t be more than a day of work for an average capable programmer, even if they are done directly on Win32 API. You can’t seriously tell me that you think they couldn’t afford one day of one programmers valuable time to do that.
An Vista Ultimate Retail license costs more than an complete PC in Europe. I think for that price they could at least pretend that they would give a crap about quality.
You know, Apple can. I didn’t switch because their stuff got so unresistible much better, it is because Microsofts products have become so unbearable much worse… i could have lived with the status quo, quality wise.
I’m a software engineer for a living. I stopped reading your post after that because I’m sure the rest of it’s garbage too. I wrote my post because I do understand software and the development life cycle and how many resources it takes to do one small thing, especially on such a large product.
Well, then it is that which i prefer on writing FOSS… when something is broken, i fix it. If there is a bug that slipped through QA from such a thing i rather have betatesters complain than dragging a pile of garbage from the early nineties along.
If Microsofts Managers are so stubborn that they don’t allow resources on getting something done that was an *major* embarrassment even eight years ago, then clearly they are doomed.
Please don’t confuse “not caring” with “having other priorities and a fixed set of resources and time.”
We all care =)
I guess you’ll get a free license of Windows 7 Ultimate (or whatever it’s called) for every “bug” you submit… won’t you? Sickening!
And what’s wrong with that?
This method of getting UI bugs looks interesting. It maybe very useful if OSAlert did something like this for a widely used OSS interfaces.
This of course assumes that OSS developers r interested in getting community help to identify UI bugs
The things that annoy me the most are non-resizable windows when they would come in very handy.
A good example is the dialog where you can edit your environment variables. This is plain shit. I even installed a tool (“Weve”) to get this better.