Iconitis

Glenn L. Austin austing at Apple.COM
Sat Apr 8 03:21:10 AEST 1989


> There are plenty of us out here who have good typing skills and the
> smarts to understand English and even Unix, and by catering to the least
> common denominator, you only cut yourselves out of a large chunk of market
> share.

Plenty of us?  I know more people who *DON'T* know Unix than those that do.
Also, I know more than a few people who are totally intimidated by an English
interface (on the PC, does "FORMAT" get my document ready for printing?).
Oh, by the way, the last parenthesizes statement is common among secretaries
who know that they have to do something to print their document, but know
Plenty of us?  I know more people who *DON'T* know Unix than those that do.
Also, I know more than a few people who are totally intimidated by an English
interface (on the PC, does "FORMAT" get my document ready for printing?).
Oh, by the way, the last parenthesizes statement is common among secretaries
who know that they have to do something to print their document, but know
very little about the PC they are using!

I spent 3 years supporting the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh computers.  During
that time, 99% of the questions asked were of the "What do I do now?" category
on the IBM PC.  I had about 30 questions (yes, only about 30) on the Macintosh
during that time, and of those, 25 were "What software should I use to do..."
questions, 4 were "I didn't know disks could wear out", and 1 was from a
person programming the Mac who accidentally erased his disk.  Oh, also, during
that time I recovered 10 formatted PC hard disks, several hundred deleted
files, and several trashed floppies (thank God for Norton Utilities!).


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| Glenn L. Austin             | The nice thing about standards is that      | 
| Apple Computer, Inc.        | there are so many of them to choose from.   | 
| Internet: austing at apple.com |       -Andrew S. Tanenbaum                  |
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| All opinions stated above are mine -- who else would want them?           |
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