These things I believe...

[mapsedge]

Excerpt:

For open source software to take over the world, we’re going to have to do a lot better at user interfaces than we have been doing.

How do I know?

Open source has already taken over the invisible parts of the world: the servers, the infrastructure, the things users need not touch directly.

Mozilla, the most user-experience-focused of open-source companies, has the most adoption by end-users.

People say things to me like, “Linux is only free if the value of my time is zero.”

These are not coincidences.

Geeky philosophical goodness.

Comments

Exactly

[iarraidh.livejournal.com]

This was my position with my past and current employer, and it has always gone unheeded. They are of the old school mentality of build a new technically-hot-rod system, then make the customer invest a lot of money and time being trained on it, then go through the learning curve of using it.

This is non-productive time for customers.

If you instead came up with a fair-to-middlin system on a technical basis but that customer could step right into it, something that fit nicely along his own already-established workflow, something intuitive to how he already does his business, so he could increase his productivity right away...

...there aren't enough banks in the world to hold how much money you'd make.

Unfortunately software companies develop and sell techie razzle-dazzle instead of researching their clientele's current work processes and then wrapping code around it to enhance what they already do.