[Nottingham] A surreal discussion

Michael perl at tecspy.com
Sat Oct 15 21:54:39 BST 2005


Simon wrote:
> Well, they did create the first user-friendly word processing program
> (aka Microsoft Word, first on the Mac) so I can see one point. 

User-friendly as defined by who? I used to prefer WordStar - no, honest!

> Another
> thing is they pretty much defined the modern operating system desktop.

...by taking existing ideas from all and sundry.

> Sometimes I really do wonder what KDE and Gnome would look like if
> Windows 95 was never released, or didn't have a taskbar & start
> button.

Neither the taskbar nor start button are MS inventions. KDE and Gnome 
would look better (think how enlightenment seemed when first released) 
if not channelled into cloning Windows paradigms by consumer demand. 
It's worth noting that KDE and Gnome needn't resemble Windows - they're 
fully customisable.

On the issue of Windows being all that kids are exposed to: y'know, I 
couldn't really give a damn - kids like to learn and will use whatever's 
available. Show them something better and they'll use that in 
preference. Same for business: if Linux is better, they'll use it. If 
they can't see the benefits, they can just keep on paying their 
stupidity tax... I mean licensing fees :)

Regards,
Michael Erskine.



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