🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jan21.152728.16754@midway.uchicago.edu> matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) writes:
>) John Gilmore writes:
>) >Secretaries all over the world use Emacs, ...
>
>Kee Hinckley writes:
>) You are dreaming.  Secretaries all over the world know how to use
>) typewriters and maybe Microsoft Word.  Secretaries all over the world
>) think Unix is someone who had a nasty accident. 
>
>Kee, you have no experience with *this* piece of the world.  Secretaries
>here use unix, emacs, and tex.

Perhaps he should have said "Secretaries in the *real* world".  It may
be that secretaries in academia or other sheltered (:-)) environments
actually use Unix and "our" tools, but out here, they use PCs (running
DOS, *maybe* with Windows) and some word processor, not emacs and a
document formatter.

In general, while *I* find the software from the FSF and other contributors
to GNU very useful, developers and academia make up a very small part of
the universe of users.  If the FSF and other GNU-ers *really* feel that the
existence of GNU will *really* make a difference in the mass market, I
think that they lack an understanding of reality (or at least, of the mass
market).  This may come from living in the groves of academe (a pleasant
place to be, but a place that leads to an insular view).  We may be
important in terms of our influence, we certainly are important in our own
minds, but we are meaningless in terms of the market as a whole (actually,
that isn't true, but it will do to a first approximation).

I tend to develop (or at least desire to develop) things that I would want
to use personally, and I want to believe that all of our customers would
find these things important also - this is a natural tendency.  However,
most of our customers (along with the *VAST* majority of all computer
users) are not developers, but are end users.  They are interested (to the
extent that they are interested at all) in application solutions, not
development or system tools, and for the most part are interested in the
simplest to use application that will solve their problems (and while emacs
and TeX are capable of solving many word processing problems, the are NOT
simple to use (no :-)).  A WYSIWYG word processor (which is an item of
scorn to many who read this group) *is* the appropriate solution to the
problem of writing letters, memos, and other (fairly short) one shot
documents.

This is longer than I had planned, but I feel that this tendency (to
overinflate the relative importance of GNU and systems/tools in general) is
a problem.  While it is important that we have the best tools that we can
available to us (and the GNU project has contributed greatly to this), we
shouldn't read more into it than is there.  When GNU finally exists, it
*WILL NOT* displace all the other operating systems in existence.  It won't
even displace all other Unixes.  The Manifesto has been accepted as gospel
by many GNU-ers, but it is a view of the world through the eyes of a
development hacker (i.e., it is the system that rms wants for himself).  It
doesn't reflect any objective reality that I know.  I use emacs, I use
document formatters, I will run GNU.  The secretaries and other end users
of the world will not.



-- 
Ted Goldblatt    ted@telematics.com     (305) 351-4367
    Telematics Intl., Inc.   Ft. Lauderdale, FL