[geeks] Nokia is getting the Rick Belluzzo treatment...

[der Mouse]

> If I put 100 hours of work into a Windows machine, a typical Linux
> desktop, and a Mac... the difference in what gets done is amazing.
> [...]

You've just summarized why I won't go near a Mac for anything serious.
Quite aside from the religious reasons (I don't run closed-source
software on my own machines), their UI design is catastrophically bad
for me in at least two major ways: (1) it borders on impossible to get
things out of reverse video (at best, you have to configure each
program individually, and that's if they're willing to let themselves
be so configured - unless I've missed something, in which case the real
problem is that it's hidden far too well); (2) their UI is designed
around the assumption that it's perfectly reasonable to mix use of
keyboard and mouse (there are few more effective ways to annoy the hell
out of me and slaughter my productivity than making me bounce back and
forth between keyboard and mouse).

Admittedly, Windows is, if anything, an even worse disaster on each of
those counts.  Linux, is better, but only somewhat.  (At least if
saddled with a "desktop environment".  When not, its problems, while
still annoying and productivity-killing for me, are of a completely
different order.)

But when I use a UI that's actually designed around my preferences, the
difference is, yes, amazing.  When I recently started sharing an
office, my officemate remarked, after a while, that my weird-looking UI
just looked weird at first, but after watching me use it, he could see
how it and I got along and how effective it made me (and I it).  (Not
that that's surprising, because it's my own design, co-evolved with my
tastes over the past 20-25 years.)

My real point here is that it's not the UI that is good or bad.  It's
the match, or mismatch, between the UI and the user.  Calling a UI bad
in general makes sense only if you take "this UI is bad" as shorthand
for "there are extremely few people this UI is well-suited to".

>> Hell, iPhone couldn't even multitask until about a year ago.  People
>> are getting lost chasing the wrong rainbows.
> Minor nit: it has always been able to multitask, that was just hidden
> from the user from a UI point-of-view.

You're confusing multitasking from a user's perspective with
multitasking from an OS perspective.  (They usually go together, but
not in this case.)

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