is ‘The Man’ designing your operating system?

From Jakob Neilsen‘s Alertbox column on Regulatory Usability at useit.com:

“I don’t like the Government telling Microsoft to make their software even worse by preventing them from integrating features into the operating system. I also don’t like the notion of user interfaces designed by the Justice Department.”

I don’t like Microsoft‘s bully tactics any more than the next guy (NOTE: I love Notepad), but I definitely agree with Jakob on this one.

 

One thought on “is ‘The Man’ designing your operating system?

  1. Maybe all operating systems can learn from this. Many people only use a handful of programs on their PC (about 5 or 6). So, Microsoft could simply allow us to install their OS with the bare minimum – about 100MB.

    Then, users can install whichever programs they like on top of this. Windows 95/98/ME Setup program does do this, but I think you should be able to choose EVERY SINGLE file that gets installed on your system.

    Plus, Linux distros could learn from this too. There are far too many distros out there which pack so much software into them. Maybe if they allowed a very basic installation package that even novices could use, it would be good. The download size would be minimal (<100MB) and people could concentrate their efforts on making this type of distro ultra-modern, e.g. full Plug & Play support, USB, SCSI etc.

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