TLUG Mailing List

> From: stephen@example.com
> To: tlug@example.com
> Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 14:07:38 +0900
> Subject: Re: [tlug] What's with this anti-Apple tirade? [was: 2014-05-10 Linux Quiz]
>
> Raider Sail writes:
>
> > Doing one thing really well is what the world wants out of a given
> > unit of computing these days.
>
> You need to be careful to hedge that a bit. I may want a spreadsheet
> and you may want a wordprocessor. If we want to share, then we both
> need a competent spreadsheet *and* a competent wordprocessor.

Right, right, thank you. Of course free and open software solutions exist for the above situation, but users are apt to complain that "Open Office shows my documents differently than Microsoft Office, and the pagination is different." (I have heard this.)

Microsoft got to define a sort of standard here because more people encountered it first, but I'm guessing more users have now discovered computing BEFORE they encountered Microsoft Office due to iOS/Android on their phones. This may be true for some time into the future because more and more new "computing" users may never even touch a desktop PC in their lives.

Looking around for some quick stats to back this assertion up, I see at http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/ a 2014 survey that says 58% of Americans have a smart phone and 90% have a cellular phone. Now 34% of Americans go online mostly with their cellular data connections. I'm thinking in Japan the single-tasking, small screen "only" user is even more prevalent than in America.

Also from the same source, predictions found in 2010 at http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/06/11/will-we-live-in-the-cloud-or-the-desktop/ suggest that by 2020, most Americans will not be using general desktop computers much at all.

If a "standard cloud app UI" emerges, Microsoft or other closed vendors could come out on top. But iOS based on FreeBSD and the Mach microkerenl may have already succeeded in doing this. How long would that matter? Samsung is being accused of copying Apple's UI for example. Relevant to this whole TLUG tirade thread is this pro-Apple article at Vanity Fair from about a week ago: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/06/apple-samsung-smartphone-patent-war "The Great Smartphone War." Apple keeps losing when it tries to trademark windowing systems, which all seem to come back to Xerox PARC's work in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

My Pew Research citations above don't address the third world, which I think is where most of the growth of computing will now occur. In that case, I don't see generic desktops (in the form of notebooks or box + monitor + keyboards or MS Windows tablets) taking precedence over Android and iOS any time soon.

So simple, single or limited multitasking GUIs are likely to get into the hands of more users than any other UI paradigm. And UNIX got there ahead of MS. I wouldn't let the lack of penetration on the general computing desktop paradigm discourage me. It's itself just a specialty platform now.