Her name is Celeste Lyn Paul, and she was just elected. She’s not really a programmer, but in the KDE world, if she tells you to change your UI, you do it. I’ve spent the last week hunting down cases of geeky wording and changing it to something normal folks understand.

Also:
According to a chart (from Microsoft) Bethlynn links in a later post, Linux & Apple are about equal in marketshare.

I am growing increasingly confident that Microsoft is losing their market dominance, but 24 months is bold. I think that you are absolutely correct however. Reading the Slashdot article on Microsoft’s disaster with the London Stock Exchange (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/07/03/1216250) really drives home the problems with Microsoft reliability. Their vicious marketing will only lose them the loyalty of their user base. I am exhibit A. Every year I question why I renew my Microsoft Action Pack. I will probably do it again this year, but one of these time I will forget.

By the way, why on earth are you using this Microsoft platform? Aren’t there oodles of Open Source blogging sites? WordPress? I thought I needed to sign up to post. It was agony working through the stupid Microsoft sign-up form.

To add further insult and injury, this stupid form won’t let me post! I am trying again as LiveJournal user. What a piece of crap!

But it’s worse than that: based on the past few decades of history, open source’s inability to deal with user interface issues stems from deep structural problems in the open source development model. Any time “shut up and show me the code” is not a valid way to address an issue, developers will split and implement both ways, and the project will either fork itself to death (gnome, kde, xfce, enlightenment, and a dozen others) or produce an unmanageable number of configuration options and delegate everything to the user (generally without sane defaults).

Maybe this will change someday, but every year since 1998 has been “the year of the Linux desktop”. We’ve cried wolf so much nobody listens to us anymore. It’s been over a decade with us still under 1% desktop market share. Dell’s linux laptops still aren’t linked from their main page. Over 90% of subnotebooks now ship with windows (because microsoft heavily subsidizes them so those come with better hardware, but the result’s the same).

Meanwhile, Apple is over 10% market share and rising. Most of the Linux kernel developers I know now do their development on mac laptops, which either dual boot MacOS X or run Linux under parallels. (I know a few who don’t even bother to do that, and ssh to a linux server to do Linux development.)

http://www.intomobile.com/2009/03/13/mobile-os-market-share-stats-confirm-rim-apple-leading-the-charge.html

As for mobile, the jury’s still out. As much hype as the iPhone regularly generates, it’s far from having the most market share; its high price and exclusive long-term carrier lock-in have almost guaranteed that for it. Windows Mobile runs on a really wide variety of phones, and is arguably the only *standard* cross-manufacturer mobile operating system — Palm’s got WebOS, Apple’s got iPhone OS, Nokia has (I believe) Symbian (as well as their own drop-in Linux thing, I think), HTC generally writes its own firmware but (under T-Mobile) has a few Android-running phones, RIM has Blackberry’s OS, and everyone else uses Microsoft. And as far as I’ve seen market share is fairly evenly divided, but everyone wants the iPhone.

You chose your words wisely; I’m not entirely certain that open source directly is going to be the one to displace Microsoft, but it might certainly be Apple — who, of course, open sources their core components (but, sadly, none of their cooler stuff, like UI).

All things considered, though, Apple could definitely be a lot more scary than Microsoft. It would be a massive regression for the computer industry if they got that much share. Too much lock-in BS.

Good luck, I hope you win, for all our sakes.