strawberryJAMM's Security and User Experience WebLog

There are three statements that Gruber made that caught my eye enough to want to comment on.

"isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work. Raymond acknowledges neither."


"Or, perhaps one could argue that it is cheap, and eventually it’s going to be good, but it’s getting there very slowly."

It's taken WinTel and the Macintosh over 20 years and lots of false starts (Xenix, OS/2, Bob, Copland, Pink, NeXtStep, ...) to get to where they are today. Based on that standard, Linux is getting there very, very quickly.

"But do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?"

Actually, yes.

The difference is that Linux will gain features incrementally across the next three years and Windows will gain them all in one big shot in 2006 (possibly with the Rolling Stones to kick it all off in a big splash). With regards to particular features in the technical stack, more advanced file sytems, desktop composition, and high quality widget/graphics sytems _already exist_. With regards to the UI, third party integrators have just now (over the last few years with Gnome and KDE) have been making major pushes to unify the interface experience (using the same kinds of usability analysis, etc. done at other commercial software vendors). Most all this happens with a very high degree of visibility, a strong commitment to existing code and other forms of interoperability, and a solid base (runtime, as it were) upon which to build.

Longhorn, on the other hand, has to be merged with XP SP2, partially back ported to Windows XP, switch all its sub components to the same version of the next generation of .Net, and continue developing all the features on the slate. Most all this happens behind the scenes from the customer's point of view, and three years from now will magically appear in a form most likely not quite ready for for production deployment on desktops. To take advantage of this new platform, existing Win32 applications need to be ported to a new widget set, possibly a new language, and definately an entirely different runtime environment. IT departments must rely on Microsoft to provide the bug fixes and support they need, which if Microsoft holds true to form will be done only if commercially expeditious, and on an uncertain schedule. (Aka. "premium" customers get priority notification of possible security holes, etc.)

There's nothing about that release schedule and marketing plan that doesn't look risky, expensive for both Microsoft and its clients, and difficult to pull off. Based on that, I'm betting that the Linux platform isn't going to have that hard of a time continuing to increase its ability to create value for end-users relatively to Windows over the next 5 years.