OSUser: BeOS Journal #16 - Bracing for Culture Clash

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BeOS Journal #16: Bracing for Culture Clash Scot Hacker, ZDNet 12/18/97 Over the past couple of months, the Be newsgroups and mailing lists have become increasingly occupied with questions and commentary about the imminent release of BeOS for Intel and other x86 processors. Naturally so, as the installed base of machines upon which BeOS can run is about to move from the minority to the majority of the world's desktops. Simultaneously, Be has become increasingly vocal about something they keep alluding to as a "cultural shift," as if to prepare the Mac faithful -- who have until recently considered BeOS an alternative meant for them alone -- for some as-yet-unspecified change in the atmosphere. Strangely though, Be has avoided making specific pronouncements regarding exactly what this atmospheric shift might entail. I've been thinking about the differences between MacOS and Windows users, as well as what impels members of both camps to gravitate toward Be. What I'm seeing in formation here is the rise of an entirely new class of computer user: the disenfranchised. What do I mean by that? Two things. On the Mac side, large cross-sections of the faithful, who have long held out hope for a platform that was once light years beyond the competition, are begrudingly losing faith in Apple's ability to deliver the goods. Sick of defending their religion in the workplace, tired of watching killer apps released for Windows first, disheartened to see Windows NT encroaching on what was once MacOS' exclusive publishing domain, and utterly baffled by Jobs' shutting down of the Mac clone market, many Mac users are acknowledging that they must turn elsewhere for their state-of-art computing needs. Meanwhile, in the Microsoft camp, users who have simply taken Windows for granted all along, who have never considered themselves to be part of an alternative, who simply use Windows because of its ubiquity, are awakening to three facts: 1) Windows has profound problems that are deeply rooted in the guts of the OS, problems that no upgrade is going to fix; 2) despite the often convenient -- and even impressive -- technological advances that Microsoft has been making (Dynamic HTML is not technology that MS has stolen or purchased - it's an important and sensible technology that they invented all by themselves), IE4 integration also has an unforgiveable tendency to destabilize users' systems; 3) Microsoft is frightening as all hell, and that using Windows and Windows apps has an econo-political dimension to it -- by purchasing Windows, you buy into an increasingly dangerous monopoly. Ralph Nader and the Justice Department have underlined this last point for the general population. In other words, there's a growing feeling that Microsoft -- like ancient Rome -- is beginning to crumble under its own weight, while Apple -- like classic literature -- may be superior in many ways to the more current offerings, but it's just not keeping up with the times or offering modern flavors of excitement. The result: long-time users from both sides are beginning to fish around for alternatives. And then they hear about BeOS, an operating system without political or technical baggage, that also happens to offer more futurism than they could ever hope for from their current systems. They check out Be's site, peruse the growing library of Be applications, and become intrigued (if not instant converts). But Be's got a little sociology problem on its hands. By virtue of the fact that they appeal to users from both sides of the fence, the Be mailing lists and newsgroups are populated with people who are still using MacOS and Windows, and have been doing so for a long time. These people are deeply habituated by years of doing things in particular ways. People who think mice should have one button, because that's the way their computers are built. People who think disk drives should always be visible whether they're mounted or not, just because that's the way their operating system has always done it (guilty!). And on and on and on. The result? Good old fashioned OS wars, repeated ad nauseum in discussion groups supposedly devoted to breaking with the past and thinking about computing in new ways. The problem is compounded by the fact that one side has already been thrown onto the defensive by a Mac-unfriendly world. Mac users have learned that they have to fight hard to make their point in a 90% Windows world. And by dint of that conditioning, they walk with their dukes up, often all-too-ready to interpret comments as attacks. Windows users, on the other hand, often simply assume that Windows is the way the world is, and have never even used a Mac or considered that there might be more sensible ways to do things. As a magnet for users from both camps, and because we need to discuss our desires for the feature set of the new OS, Be discussion groups are natural-born boxing rings. People seem to want it both ways: they want something new, but they're not willing to part with the old, when that's the whole reason they're doing the Be thing to begin with. While clamoring for new BeOS killer apps out of one side of their mouths, they're begging for ports of their favorite existing apps out of the other. While praising Be's ground-up approach, they're kvetching that Be doesn't do things the way their current OS does. What's Be going to face when they start offering the Intel version for download from their site? More of the above, and something else too: a different kind of user, with different expectations. Windows users are already accustomed to seeing apps crash without bringing down the system - Windows is already fairly crash-resistant. Windows users won't be as impressed by being able to download, copy files, print, and play movies simultaneously - they've been able to do that for a long time thanks to kludgy but fairly effective pre-emptive multitasking. |
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