Re: Bundling and operating systems

[Eric Lee Green <elgreen@iname.com>]

On Sun, 19 Dec 1999 20:37:30 +0800 (CST) Dan Strychalski <dski@ms17.hinet.net> 
said:
>Well, a few jaunts around the KDE pages gave me the *strong* impression
>that wherever Microsoft goes, the KDE people will follow (I was looking
>mainly at keyboard issues). With perhaps a tad more flexibility, but
>only the teeny-weeniest tad.

People who come to KDE from a Windows background think it looks a lot like
Windows. People who come to KDE from a Unix background think it looks a lot
like CDE (the default Unix desktop environment on most Unix workstations).
People who look at the internals of KDE appear to be favorably impressed by  a
generally clean paradigm that owes nothing to any other OS (I'm in networking,
not UI design, so I can't really personally comment) but that's not visible to
end users. As far as the user interface goes, the KDE folks appear to be equal
opportunity idea snatchers -- as with Microsoft, they are not innovators, their
innovation lies in integrating all these various ideas into a coherent whole,
not in their ability to come up with new paradigms.

BTW, regarding my opinion of Microsoft's strengths, even Steve Balmer, in an
interview with the Irish Times, admits that Microsoft's primary innovation lies
in integration, not in creation of new paradigms. This is no small thing --
people want a well-integrated user environment that does not require them to
assemble a bunch of individual components in order to get a usable solution
(otherwise Linux OS CD-ROMS would not come bundled with so much software) -- but
it always irritates me when people give Microsoft credit for innovation in the
computer industry. Windows 95 was a blatant derivative of ideas which had come
before, with some Mac, some Amiga, some OS/2, even some Unix ideas tossed in.
It was a very good derivative of those ideas (I believe that the Mac's slumping
market share starting in 1995 is directly correlated to the fact that Windows
95 was clearly superior to MacOS), but the only real innovation involved was
Microsoft's ability to integrate all these disparate ideas into a coherent
whole (at least from a user's point of view -- according to developers I've
talked to, the actual internals are a bloody mess). 

 -- 
Eric Lee Green   e_l_green@hotmail.com
  http://members.tripod.com/e_l_green/