Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on February 25, 2006 02:10 AM
You're only half right.
The other part, which you did not mention, is that buying decisions are often not made by the users themselves, but rather by top brass who often "force" people to use either an application or operating system that said top brass read about in IT World or some other similar periodical. For example, I once worked for a firm that used Apple Macs with Photoshop to do their graphical design. We got bought by another company, and their executives came in and forced the graphics shop (under threat of termination) to change to MS Windows machines, which gave the graphic designers the fits. Their productivity plumetted while they struggled with having to learn Windows, and they hated the repeated crashes that came with Windows. I know this, because I was their sysadmin at the time.
Thus, to keep your job, you may be forced to learn a specific software package which you find to be an inferior tool (e. g. having to learn Quicken vs. GnuCash, which is actually superior to the former). It's the network effect, not superiority of the application, that's in play here, otherwise Linux and/or Mac OS X would be on *everybody's* desktop by now, instead of the inferior Windows (especially XP). That's also why you still see some Web sites written "for Internet Explorer only" instead of "for any HTML 4.0.1-compliant browser", such as Firefox or Mozilla SeaMonkey.
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Re:Lying to yourselves!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 25, 2006 02:10 AMThe other part, which you did not mention, is that buying decisions are often not made by the users themselves, but rather by top brass who often "force" people to use either an application or operating system that said top brass read about in IT World or some other similar periodical. For example, I once worked for a firm that used Apple Macs with Photoshop to do their graphical design. We got bought by another company, and their executives came in and forced the graphics shop (under threat of termination) to change to MS Windows machines, which gave the graphic designers the fits. Their productivity plumetted while they struggled with having to learn Windows, and they hated the repeated crashes that came with Windows. I know this, because I was their sysadmin at the time.
Thus, to keep your job, you may be forced to learn a specific software package which you find to be an inferior tool (e. g. having to learn Quicken vs. GnuCash, which is actually superior to the former). It's the network effect, not superiority of the application, that's in play here, otherwise Linux and/or Mac OS X would be on *everybody's* desktop by now, instead of the inferior Windows (especially XP). That's also why you still see some Web sites written "for Internet Explorer only" instead of "for any HTML 4.0.1-compliant browser", such as Firefox or Mozilla SeaMonkey.
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