[fab] /.

[Christopher Blizzard]

> 5) Vista a Problem?
> (Score:5, Interesting)
> by eldavojohn 
> 
> Do you view Vista as a threat to your user base? Do you or people on your 
> team ever change your mind about things or let looming Vista influence 
> your decisions?
> 
> I'm hoping that Linux distros are not pressured into adding unneeded bells 
> and whistles in a desperate attempt to compete with Vista. Are you 
> invulnerable from this mentality?

It's not about competing with Vista.  Trying to match Vista one-for-one 
for features is a game we can not win.  Not only do we not have the same 
single focus mentality that Microsoft can bring to the table, but it 
also allows Microsoft to set the rules of the game.

I think that we should be looking for ways to change the rules of the 
game to make it possible for us to win.  You need to ask youself the 
questions: what can we do that Microsoft would be unwilling to do?  What 
are our strengths, and what can we bring to the table?  How can we take 
their greatest asset - Microsoft Windows - and turn it into their 
greatest liability?

In our world, software is free.  Both in terms of cost but also in terms 
of how we can give it to other people.  But why is it so hard for us to 
install software?  Now, some might say that dpkg and rpm make it easy, 
but in reality, it doesn't.  It requires going out to a server, the 
software is packaged up in a way that requires system access to a 
machine to install and - frankly - I don't think we've changed the game 
in this area as well as we could have.  Why is it that if I had a piece 
of software on my machine that I can't just give it to the guy next to 
me?  Why is it that it's so hard to make a change to a piece of software 
and then make that change available to someone else?  We talk about 
diversity, but we actually abhor it.  Our tools make it hard to enjoy 
the very freedoms that we hold dear.

And last, we have spent years building a desktop system that is 
basically a clone of the windows and apple monopolies.  We cherry pick 
features we like and we re-implement them, often poorly and not well 
integrated.  But in doing so, we're letting the other guy define what 
our experience is and we are willing to allow others to define out basic 
interactions.  Once again, what can we do that the others can not?  We 
can let the communicate directly with each other.  Each of the other 
guys cares about making themselves an intermediary, because then they 
"own" the customer and they can make money off the inevitable 
transactions.  But we don't have to do that.  So we can provide a more 
pure, safe and friendly experience.  But we don't.  We end up writing 
programs that let us use their networks to talk to each other, and 
poorly at that.

And we're not willing to try out new experiences for the desktop. 
Gimme, OLPC and other desktop metaphors are the closest we have, but we 
usually fail to embrace them fully.  We're not going to win by making a 
better Windows than Windows.  But what we can do is change the rules and 
make them chase us instead of the other way around.

--Chris