[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Being filled with boundless naivete, I felt the current
success of Linux could probably be boiled down to this: if you
undertake something knowing that it is reputedly very difficult,
yet worthwhile, you don’t do it with inflated expectations of
immediate success. You do it with a certain amount of respect.
Eg, a lot of people pick up the guitar and whack out a few chords,
and give it up, certain that if that is guitar-playing, they’ll
never be as good as Jimmi Hendrix. On the other hand, if you decide
to take up the renaissance lute, the difficulty of getting
information on the instrument, the slim chance of finding people to
play with, and the difficulties of getting an instrument, mean that
you have probably considered the options much more carefully, and
your chances of succeeding are correspondingly higher.”
“Thus it is with Unix. People have been repeating the story of
Unix’s difficulty of use for so long it has become one of
Information Technology’s sacred texts. Whereas with NT, we have
been inundated with the news of its ‘ease of use’ that we have
accepted it uncritically. So people pick it up, expecting it to be
as ‘easy to use’ as Microsoft’s other products, and forgetting that
it is now operating in a totally different environment, where the
desktop certainties frankly don’t hold. (But let us never forget
that the ‘Letters to the Editor’ columns in most computer magazines
are filled with complaints about Windows failing somewhere along
the line.) “