Some interesting points you made there.
But then again, this Pete guy he talks about seems to have quite a bit of street knowledge about computers. 6 years now, and he's doing well for himself. So no doubt he would have hear of Apple computers and their MaxOS. The facts would have drifted over to him saying that it is pretty much completely different in use than Windows. I'm just thinking out loud about what should be expected. But assuming what I thought to be relatively correct, then Pete would expect to be stepping into a whole other system when sitting in front of the white computer. The keyboard looks different that a windows keyboard... so wouldn't he expect it to react differently and not have the same shortcuts?
Once again, I really think the author described a typical situation very well. But to someone with 6 years of knowledge on windows, I'd expect him to jump into Mac OS, not with utter astonishment, but entertainment of sorts. This is something new, and should be experimented with.
Sorry for rambling, hopefully it came out legible and comprehendable.
Well, yeah, Pete would have heard of the MacOS. But as a person who has had no experience with a MacOS, what would have he heard about it? It would not have been wrong to say that he would have heard his MacOS using friends say, how nice a GUI it has, how seemlessly it's programs tend to work, how marvellously crash free it is, and the only time it crashes is when they try to run MS Word in it, and so on.Everybody knows that the Macintosh has an elegant user interface, right? The very paradigm of ease-of-use?So it would be fair for him to expect an OS much easier to use than Windows. None of these "marketing" opinions consider the fact that, however "clunky" the MS Windows GUI maybe, MS Windows users are used to that clunky interface, and invariably expect all MS Windows applications to work like that.
I'll quote the beginning of the preface for the Unix Hater's Guidebook which gives a similar thing but on a much lighter vein.“I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.”
— Ken Pier, Xerox PARC Yes. Most people I know will be fascinated initially by a change in the environment a MacOS has to offer. The panel you see in the desktop is a cool way of launching applications at first. But when you want to get some work done and want some extra windows open and you want that panel to dissappear, a regualar MS Windows user usually expects to be able to right click and select hide, or press a close button in the upper right hand corner. If he has to fumble once or twice to do a simple task like that, or has to google for that, then the MacOS GUI becomse clunky to him. It all reduces what we are used to and how we expect things to happen.
I think this was what Rashakil Fol meant when he said that life is too short to worry about OSes. Users tend to use what they are most comfortable with, and find other tools that differ clunky.
