Windows Refund day - reaction

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| 	    ...
| 	    I'm just amazed at the anger and lack of comprehension in most
| 	    of the posts there.
| 	    ...

| 	Hoping that I say this gently and diplomatically,
| 	but it is probably fair to imagine that mastering
| 	Windows 95 as a user may well be the high point
| 	of skill and intellectual challenge in many lives.

This is probably a good observation. A phenomenon that has left me in
a somewhat bemused state on occasion has been the rabid reactions for
and against things like programming  languages  and  editors.   As  a
long-term computer programmer who has learned zillions of such things
and considers them to be tools, I find it hard to relate  to  someone
having an emotional attachment to them.  But many people do.

The best explanation I've seen of this  is  that  most  people,  when
forced by circumstance to make a large investment in something, don't
want to look like fools by being told that their time was wasted.  So
if  some  other  competing  thing  comes  along that is claimed to be
better, they will automatically attack it without even  bothering  to
learn  about it, because they don't want to learn that they've wasted
time or money.

Most "techies" find this hard to relate to. A new language or editor?
Hmm ...  Let's see how it works, and what it's good (and bad) for. We
tend to like finding tradeoffs which show that the new thing is  "not
better,   just  different."  We'll  even  take  the  time  to  become
semi-proficient in something as  crappy  as  DOS,  both  to  use  the
(occasionally  quite good) apps that only run there, and also to pick
up the occasional idea that they did better than our favorite system,
with the idea of adding it to the better system.

But most people aren't like this. Even some techies aren't. I've seen
any  number  of  C programs that were obviously written by Fortran or
Pascal programmers, for instance.  Many people just don't pick  up  a
second computer language, just as when they study a foreign language,
they will learn words but continue to use English grammar.  (I recall
really  impressing  my  high  school  German  and  French teachers by
rapidly learning non-English syntax and using it. At they time, I was
puzzled  by  their even mentioning it, because I thought that was why
you'd want to study other languages.)

Most of the criticism I've seen of Unix-like systems have  come  from
people  who weren't the least bit familiar with it, and the criticism
was usually just about superficial UI differences.  Unix  users  will
then dismiss the critism because it doesn't face the real reasons one
chooses one system over another.  OTOH, most of the  criticisms  I've
seen  of  Microsoft  systems  have  been from people who had at least
taken the  time  to  learn  something  about  them,  and  had  enough
knowledge of some other system to make a meaningful comparison.

As a result, we are seeing some W95isms in newer Unix software.  This
might  actually  be unfortunate, because think of how much better off
we'd be if the UI ideas had been borrowed from the Mac instead.