osOpinion: Remaining obstacles to World Domination

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“InstallShield for Linux is more important than M$ Office.
Sure, I can browse the README, unpack tar.gz archives and run the
appropriate makes – and know my rpm command line. Problem is my
boss doesn’t do this. Even though he certainly could learn it,
he doesn’t really bother – he trusts his supplier and wants an easy
install. InstallShield is perfect for him: a few questions, a cup
of coffee, and then the icon appears and he’s set to do what he
wants.”

“An intelligent InstallShield-like application that we could use
to pack up all our interesting applications would be a Good Thing
for Linux. For source distributions it’d have to call make after
unpacking, and the wait would be a bit longer, but what matters is
easy. Microsoft did one hell of a good job requesting all Windows
95 programs to have an automatic install and uninstall. (That the
uninstallers often break is irrelevant here.) Autorun and good
install programs are plain great features for end users.”

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