Longhorn, why should I care?
This is a question everyone will be asking as time progresses towards the date that Longhorn will be released to manufacturing, and then into stores and onto home computers worldwide.
In the comments of this post from Robert Scoble, Nicole Simon makes a good point.
Why should anyone care about Longhorn? Why? Aside from a subset of the windows users community, which fit into the “super users” group of individuals, not many will care too much what is actually in an operating system.
I remember chatting to one of my cousins many years back, and I asked him, “so what kind of car do you drive?”. His answer? “Oh, don’t know, as long as it gets me from point A to point B without too many worries it’s good enough for me.”.
That’s a really good point to bringup when discussing Longhorn, or anything new that users are expected to migrate to in the future. When evaluating whether to move to Longhorn now or later, ask yourself these questions:
1. Will it give me any improvement over what I can do right now with my current tool set?
2. Will it work as reliably as my current operating system?
3. Do I really need any of those new fandangled features that the operating is claiming it offers?
Common sense should prevail. It’s like when you go into the car dealership to buy a new car, do your own research first, and make up your mind before you go into the showroom. Of course the car dealer is going to try to sell you the car as well as features A E I O U and Z.
You know all that you really need is features A and B. But you heard your friends really excited about features O U and Z. You think, hey, if my friends are excited about it, then darn well, so should I! You look at your bank balance, damn, that’s going to cost… But the car dealer, as sneaky as ever says he can get you features E O and U, and throw in a brand new pair of racing gloves as worn by last years’ Formula 1 champion. But you’ll need to purchase feature A, Z and W.
Feature ‘W’? You do the math for all the different features added together and then look at the price the dealer is offering. It is clearly much cheaper than buying all the features one by one added onto the car.
Thinking that you’re about to nab an absolute bargain! You say to the dealer, you’re impressed with the deal that he can do for you, but you’ll need a bit more time to finalise your decision.
You shake hands with the car dealer, he hands you his business card and grabs a biro from his shirt pocket and underlines his mobile number emphasising to you that if you have any questions just give him a buzz and he’ll answer all your questions personally. Being as greatful as you always are, you shake hands with him and thank him for being so helpful.
In your mind you are now so hyped up about the bargain deal you’ve done with the car dealer, and you are yet to realise that all you really wanted was features A and B in the first place. You remember the car dealer talking about feature W. You’ve never even heard of feature W, but it excites you nonetheless. You call over a mate on the mobile and enquire about feature W, you also mention about the deal that you’re getting from the dealer. The friend, as excited as you are, says “wow, impressive deal” and continues to rave on about how cool features O U and Z are.
It’s at this point that the phone goes silent, and you remember that you only really wanted feature A and B anyway, and not all the other junk that’s being pushed down to you. Buying only features A and B will save you more money than you would be paying for the deal that the dealer has convinced you that you need and is an absolute bargain.
As you can see, if all you really want is to be able to surf the web, chat with your friends on instant messenger, listen to the occassional web radio broadcast (or even podcast), then you have to make that type of assessment before you decide on something.
Wait until after those on the tech edge have done their reviews, their rants and maybe some raves about all the features they like, don’t like. But before that, know what you need and don’t need. Because chances are when you see all the “fluff” about feature O U W Z, you might decide “oh, I might actually find that feature useful sometime in the future”. But of course, you never actually get around to using that feature.
Hype is ok, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Just make sure you keep in perspective what you really do need, and what you don’t.
Though it is possible to argue that the customer doesn’t really know what they want, because we (software developers) can give them what they want and more. But really, is it what they want, or is it what you think is cool and because you think it’s cool, justifies why it should be included in the product.
MacOSX may well be the perfect product for you, but for others it may well be Debian or FreeBSD. And then for countless others, they don’t care, but because they’ve been using Windows for so long, Windows is what they will continue to use.
I don’t use Mozilla Firefox. I do have it installed. I have followed it since the early days of Phoenix. I’ve just not found a need for it. No amount of “hey this is cool, you should use it, it doesn’t give you any spyware, it is safer, etc…” will change that. I use IE because that’s what i’ve used for so long. I’m quite satisfied with it because it does what I need it to do. It allows me to read my blogs on bloglines, as well as visit some forums. If for some reason there was something specific to Firefox that I need, then, and only then, will I need to use it. I do pop open Firefox though at work (i’m a web application developer!) from time to time to make sure things still look okay on it. If I had Opera installed, i’d also check out how it looks on Opera.
In the end, the customer has to decide for themselves what they need, why they need it. And which product best suits their needs.
It never hurts to delay the purchase of a newly released product to evaluate whether or not it is really worth your while. Large organisations always assess their options before deciding on one, so why shouldn’t you?
Sorry, you might have read the blog post title and thought i’d give you all a wide ranging view on what you should care about in Longhorn. Guess the title was kinda deceptive. I’m just trying to make sure people take a reality check before deciding on whether or not bits of hype (which may actually be fictional, or won’t be out right now… such as some of the perceived features that WinFS was supposed to deliver, and taking out of said feature would remove all that you should be excited about with Longhorn, but that’s another point for another time) is really worth it.
Make your own decisions based on facts, rather than hype. Remember the friends in my above story hyping up various really “cool” add-on features for a new car. If you don’t need it, ignore it, it is certainly nice to know that it is there and all that.