Ubuntu loosing its popularity

[Art Edwards]

On 11/30/2011 11:24 AM, J wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 12:36, Art Edwards
> <edwardsa at icantbelieveimdoingthis.com> wrote:
>> Interesting that you brought up push button drive. That ended up being a
>> gimmick that was dropped a few years later by all the major auto makers.
>> I had a 1963 Dodge Dart with push button drive. Not a great innovation,
>> really. IMHO, either is the dock in Unity.
> Only because the shifter on the stalk and in the console were "more
> familiar" and not as strange.  However, if you notice today's vehicles
> are slowly coming back to push button drive.
>
> There's been push-button AWD/4WD for some time now, and high end and
> even some lower end cars are coming with push-button or spinny-knob
> automatic transmissions.
>
> So really, if you're saying that Unity is the Push Button Automatic,
> well, then it will eventually become accepted.
>
AWD/4WD is a niche. In that sense Unity will probably be accepted.  If I
were to guess the non-4WD transmision variations are a marketing
gimmick. It's something new without any increase functionality.  So, in
that sense, it's better than Unity--Unity reduces functionality, or
makes the functionality more clumsy.

I do think that the idea of being accepted /eventually/ is telling.
Important innovations are readily accepted. Cell phones, laptops, USB
drives, as examples, needed no persuasion. Even things like tablets and
smart phones have been immediate successes. Their utility was obvious.
When you have to have arguments with your users about the utility of
something, you should listen to it. That is not the sound of brilliant
innovation. When you see surveys like the one at the top of this thread,
it should tell you something. When Linus Torvalds calls Gnome 3 'an
unholy mess' in a g+ thread attended by major developers who agree, the
abandonment of a great interface should be rethought. As I have stated,
now that I have Xfce working well, this is more of an academic
conversation. I'm guessing that Xfce will be the new gnome.

Art Edwards
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