Verizon DSL

[Eric S. Johansson]

Sean Miller wrote:
> Rajiv Vyas wrote:
> 
>> What really surprised me was that when I asked this tech support guy
>> at Linksys about how many calls they get from Linux users, he said
>> that almsot none. That was very disappointing. It basically means that
>> all the Gartner and IDC studies that come out about 2% market share
>>  
>>
> No, I do not agree....
> 
> Remember that most Linux users are far more "au fait" with what they're 
> doing than Windows users... most would not ring the tech support guy for 
> help as they'd realise he was unlikely to be able to provide anything 
> useful... generally these ISPs supply sufficient information on sign-up 
> (or on online help systems) to be enough for your clued-in Linux 
> advocate to configure anything necessary.

most technically astute Linux users are their own and the communities 
worst enemies.  I say this because usually, but not always, they lack 
empathy for the remaining 99.99% of the world that views computers as a 
tool like a hammer or a backhoe.  Don't get me wrong I think Ubuntu is 
wonderful.  It is by far the most user-friendly, "let me get on with my 
work" distribution I've ever used.

At the same time, converting my wife's system to Ubuntu was unpleasant. 
  Trying to get everything working (sound applications, flash, java, 
IRC) was a bit of a struggle.  Not impossible like other distributions 
but a struggle.  I needed to install things from back ports, soft link 
libraries, redirect sound destinations.  Heck, I still need to figure 
out what I did wrong during installation with smp versus Uniprocessor.
(note: she's happy with it now but it took some work on my part.  Far 
more work than a Windows machine would've taken.)

I cannot imagine my wife being able to cope with Ubuntu on her own.  If 
she didn't have me to provide technical support, she would be running 
Windows because that's what her friends use and that's what she can 
purchase support for.  $50 per hour, somebody comes to your house and 
makes your PC work right.  don't argue for community supplied online 
support because it doesn't help if you can't get online, don't know it 
exists, or you get no response.

and until someone like my wife can cope with Linux with or without $50 
per hour home PC repair services, we won't move out of the 5% ghetto, 
hardware vendors will mostly ignore us, and application vendors will 
steer clear of us.

remember, there are some advantages to growth.

> But, as I've said earlier, in many cases these are LAN connections 
> anyway and the routers deal with the DSL or cable connections and DNS 
> resolution.... so, to be frank, when things don't work the last thing 
> you need is ISP support... it's more support from the Linux communities 
> of which you are a part...
> 
> ...and that's us :-)

think about what will happen if the number of people requesting help 
increased by one order of magnitude.  That's only moving your market 
share from 2% to 20%  The number of people requesting help would 
increase tenfold.  could we cope?  I don't think so.  I'm already seeing 
signs of donor fatigue in almost every open source project.  Hell, I'm 
suffering from donor fatigue on my projects and as my wife knows 
altogether too well, Shoemaker's children go barefoot.

If we're going to grow, and if, as I believe, the user community won't 
be able to cope then we will need to find different mechanisms for 
support.  Personally, I'm fond of staffing 1-900-clu-eless as a funding 
mechanism (for those outside the US, 900 area code numbers charge large 
per minute fees to caller).

anyway, something to think about.

---eric