What are consequences (the lack of freedom on the USA)

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Thomas Dodd wrote:

>> Unfortunately, the complexity that attracted you to Enlightenment is the
>> same complexity that scares less technically inclined users away.  
>
>It's unfortunate that complexity scares people. But I don't buy it. They 
>by very complex devices, that they have no idea about. Look at a car. 
>They have some very complex systems. If you want you cna modify them to 
>behave in different ways. But you can still use the default setup and 
>just ignore all the complexity. The average driver doesn't even change 
>the oil anymore, but the ability to change the internals of the engine 
>is still there.
>

You need to do a month taking support phone calls. You will quickly 
learn that cars and computers are very different to most people. People 
get in cars and only really care about the speedometer, the gas gauge 
and the red lights, the rest of the eye candy that designers put in they 
ignore. On computers they dont know what parts are the important ones 
and so they dont ignore any of the eye candy and get very confused and 
angry.

By the way, you can change the system however YOU want.. Red Hat doesnt 
stop that. THey do make the base interface a LCD than you though.

>But that's the general trend. Poor dumb user cannot figure out how to 
>use a fork and a spoon so we'll just give them a spoon, and never serve 
>food that you need a fork to eat. Or maybe a spork, it's not as good as 
>both seperately, but it's good enough for most uses of a fork or a spoon.


>> account the needs of their target audience.  Enlightenment is obviously
>> targeted at a technically inclined user base.  That's great if that's
>> what you're looking for, but I think in general most of us want to hit a
>> larger target.  
>
>So when E was the GNOME wm, people couldn't figure out how to use it? I 
>never saw any one say E was to technical for them. I saw some who never 
>changed the defaults, but never anyone who thought it too technical.

You didnt take RH support phone calls did you? You only see what people 
post to mailing lists and those people are usually technically in the 
second to third sigma of users. 66%-95% of all users don't know much on 
computers beyond what they have to get a browser, an email client, and 
an editor up. Until there are universal computer licenses required 
before you can drive the 'Information SuperHighway', I doubt that will 
change. It is the last 5% of users of computers these days that know 
about mailinglists, etc etc. It is about the last <1% that know about 
what eye-candy is useful, and what is cruft.

The issue is that these numbers have changed greatly over the last 20 
years. 20 years ago, the <1% were 95% of all computer users. 10 years 
ago they 25%, 5 years ago they were probably 5-10%, and now they are 
becoming a small subset.


-- 
Stephen John Smoogen            smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Labrador  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 5-8058
Ta-03 SM-261  MailStop P208 DP 17U  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --