We are so close
May 16th, 2005Recently the Austin Entrepreneurship Program brought Bob Foulor, of MSN marketing research, in to talk with us about Microsoft. We ended up talking more about google then we did about Microsoft. With quotes like, “Nobody will by lining up for the next Windows release” he really made it sound like Microsoft is having a hard time. He went around the room asking people how they used their computer, and for most people it was just a bitch session about how slow and insecure Windows is… I did not hear any actual constructive feedback, but oh well, hopefully he enjoyed the pizza.
After that talk I started reading some of Paul Graham’s latest essays. He mostly talks about how to start companies and why young people should. The common theme through out all of his papers is, “Make something people want.” Relating this back to the Microsoft evening I quickly realized that Microsoft is not doing what customers want. They do a lot of things partially and not very well, but since they are the only ones even close customers go to them.
Customers want a faster and more secure operating system. They want it to be more intuitive. They want to have everything “just work”. People want to have systems so consistent that they can think as if they were the computer and predict its behaviors (side note, I think Google search does a great job of this). With the success of products like Firefox it is evident that this is indeed the case. It is not by chance that an alternative browser has become to popular, it is evidence that people are looking for something new.
So then, what to do? We have this hodge-podge of free-software laying around… maybe it is time we get it up to the right level, bundle it up, and release it. Ubuntu seems to be giving this a shot. However, they may be a touch too early. The free software environment is missing many things. For example, maybe we need to wait for open office 2.0. While the current open office is good… I do not think that it is friendly enough for most end users. We also need some sort of calendaring equivalent. Mozilla will hopefully tackle this one. Finally we need to integrate all these components together into a supportable package that can be easily distributed. Again, Ubuntu is making headway on this. Hopefully Mark and his team can pull it off.
People are beginning to want something different. We are so close to accommodating them. All the communities need to do is make something that is genuinely better. If you serve something that is really good, the customers will never leave. As Mr. Graham asks, “can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?”
May 16th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
Nice post. I think half of the problem is making people what they want, and the other half is letting them know that someone has what they want. Not all users know their options, and I hope this will be something that changes through enthusiastic community-backed efforts like we’ve witnessed with Firefox and other open source projects. There has to be a way to compete with megabucks marketing, and I hope we find it. After all, knowing is half the battle.
May 17th, 2005 at 7:39 am
Yes, OpenOffice.org 2.0 is very competitive with MS-Office. In some ways, it’s even better (I’m using the OOo 1.9.100 beta).
I’m going to be working on a classroom workbook for OOo writer this coming Summer for use in high schools–which will be released as open source.
Getting Linux into the middle and high schools as a daily use desktop is key. One obstacle to this is the IS department in each school district: they are consistently understaffed, so they are reluctant to support change to Linux as a desktop in school classrooms (however, some are supporting and using Linux as a Server). Depending on the authority and power of IS staff in each school district, this can be a major obstacle to adopting Linux on the desktop. Also, already stressed teachers are reluctant to change.
I’m upgrading my high school computer lab this Summer–all machines will dual-boot Linux/MS-Windows XP. At least half the students’ time will be spent using the Linux platform. OpenOffice Writer will be the only word processing platform taught in my lab. Programming classes will be taught under both Linux and Windows (Python, Java, and C++).
May 17th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
I’m a firm believer of the “people have no idea what they want” camp. Take a look at a well-integrated, function desktop environment like KDE. It has it’s own office-equivalent suite, e-mail programs, etc. It’s also easy to use, and in terms of a full-scale desktop environment built on X, reasonable fast. So, it meets all of your requirements for what people would want, and yet, there are more than a few Linux users who don’t use it. I for one, don’t even have it installed; I’m relatively sure you don’t either. Obviously, I’m not declaring myself representative of the majority, but there has to be something else to this.
I think the big issue here is already maintaining the majority. Take Office for example: It has a huge percentage of the market share for office applications, and even though a particular version works fine, and a new release offers few to no features people need, many organizations will upgrade anyway, realizing their clients/customers may send documents in the newest format and they might require the upgrade, or other reasons. Even opening Word documents in OpenOffice, I see there isn’t a perfect conversion, and sometimes am left having to open these in Word. So, even though I might like OpenOffice better, I can’t get away from having Word. In the minds of a customer of sysadmin, if I were to rely on Word at any level, why bother also installing AbiWord or OpenOffice; it’s just another word processor I’d need to administer, and we already have Word.
On the operating system level, I agree with a believe long-held by my dad “security is the opposite of efficiency.” If you’re creating a very secure operating system, it will probably not be as fast as a less secure one, and if it is, it will probably have gotten there by removing features. So for _everything_ to “just work” would obviously require a downstep in security. Take the opening of e-mail attachments for example. In Windows, the attachments “just work”, which is nice for stupid little executables, except that most of these are viruses. In Linux, you’d have to save said executable and chmod it be executable, at which point it still only runs with your user’s permissions. So Linux by default doesn’t always “just work,” and I believe that’s the way it should be. Linux has a place in the desktop market, but I don’t believe it’s for everybody, and not necessarily even for the majority. Even for us experienced Linux users, some things are just frustrating.
So, what is the change people are looking for? I think perhaps the biggest change is licensing and product life. Even with Linux distros, many product lives are limited to 18 months or less. Average Joe doesn’t necessarily want to change his system every year and a half–all he’s doing is checking his e-mail and buying things on eBay. And business get tired of being contractually forced to buy service agreements for products that might not even be around through the duration of the contract (a recent Microsoft problem).
Therefore in conclusion, my real answer to “what is it that people are looking for?” is friendliness, helpfulness, and support. They want to start being treated like customers. They want help when they need it, and don’t necessarily want to have to read a bunch of message boards hoping for an answer. Linux’ big strength, yet biggest weakness, is it’s customizability. It is incredibly difficult to help someone with Linux remotely, because they could have any kernel, any windowing system, any particular kernel modules, any packages, etc. This, is why I don’t think Linux can, or should attempt, to have the majority of the market. But I don’t think people are willing to lose their corporate ties. They want big brother holding their hand with their expensive purchases, and that seems fair enough.
I’ve written too much, and a lof of this is off-topic, so I’ll get back to work :-)
May 19th, 2005 at 8:53 am
[...] sfaction
Filed under: Mozilla, OSL — 5/19/2005 @ 8:52 am
After reading Alex Polvi’s blog I had customer satisfaction on the brain and then I got to attend a rece [...]
May 19th, 2005 at 9:05 am
I think its time Danny gets his own blog instead of squatting on Polvi’s real estate … :-) Just kidding … :-)
May 19th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
Fine, I’ll copy-and-paste mine over on my own real estate. It was a welcome break from Plone and CSS that got a little out of hand :-)
May 20th, 2005 at 8:47 pm
Regarding Danny’s post,
I’m actually one of those weirdos that use KDE for all the reasons that Alex mentions. It just works. It’s fairly simple, and I don’t have to learn a full new set of command line kludge to customize it to my liking. I run (k)ubuntu on my laptop for this same reason. Ubuntu’s reached the point where I actually feel comfortable recommending it to my not-quite savvy friends.
Oh, and who actually expects to email a program to their friend and for that to work? Generally you link to a program’s website and they download it themselves. I’d be rather annoyed if someone emailed a 6 meg elf executable that may or may not work on my distro to me.
Good read overall (to both you guys) :)