"Now, the git people were obviously convinced that the whole
distributed issue was so technically superior that you really
needed to understand it, and that there was no way to make git
centralized to match the expectations of people. So for git, it
really had to be about trying to teach people, even if to some
degree it's much harder to change peoples' expectations to match
the software than it usually is to change the software to suit
people.
"Did it work? It seems to have. The whole thing about
distributed SCMs and how it quite fundamentally changes how you
have to think about some issues does seem to be calming down.
People are getting used to git, and we're seeing less noise about
how it's such a difficult learning model with a steep learning
curve. But it literally took time. Lots of time. And it's still
ongoing.
"And that example is from something pretty technical, where
there really were some pretty damn strong arguments for it. When it
comes to people getting used to a much fuzzier "whole desktop
experience" with all that implies, it takes even longer."