Ben Lutgens <blutgens at sistina.com> wrote:
> 
> You're a better man than I am. People don't _want_ to learn a new OS and
> apps unless they are geeks like we are. There will be one question in
> thier mind "Why can't I just use M$ Word?" because 99% of the corporate
> planet knows how to use that.

But don't forget that it wasn't too long ago when WordPerfect had the
dominant position.  I'm always amazed that they've basically kept the same
menu structure for so long.  If you find a copy of WP for Windows, the
menu layout is basically the same as what was on WP 5.1 on DOS!  Anyone
who became moderately talented with WP years ago wouldn't and then
transitioned to Word would have little trouble getting back to how things
were done in the past.

At any rate, this is an example of Marketing 101, which I didn't know
until Monday.  I'm taking an MIS intro course (a prerequisite a better
course, I hope), where I was shown a slide entitled `How to compete in the
marketplace' or something similar.  The first point was `Create high
switching costs'.  I just about fell off my chair.

There were a few other points on that slide, none of which really said
much about how to compete as a company, but rather how to keep others from
competing with you (creating high barriers to entry was another point).

It's going to be an interesting class...

> I say et M$ have the desktop. And let's concentrate our energies on the
> server end. Specifically in middleware, and cross-platform file serving.
> There's good money in this area without all the HUGE overhead of
> supporting massive amounts of individual machines and non-technical
> users who can't understand why they need to "mount" a floppy or cdrom
> and don't want to understand it either.

Floppy?  Wha?  People use those things?  We're talking about the
`corporate desktop' here, not a public lab.

I used to work in a company where less than a tenth of the PCs had floppy
or CD-ROM drives.  Removeable media is not necessary in most cases.

All hail Steve Jobs ;-)

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   "Very funny, Scotty. Now
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   beam down my clothes."
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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