« FC4 samba_share_t problem | Main | Get rich from spam, now 100% legal and fair »
November 27, 2005
Some thoughts on a Sunday afternoon
Across the street from our office there is a Pizza Restaurant. Actually, there was one - because they've just closed it down for renovation. The new banner says it will become a Cafe starting with December 1st and the coffee-addicted part of me is (okay, maybe a little bit suspiciously) looking forward to it.
One of the reasons for which the Pizza Restaurant Across The Street From Our Office (F.K.A. "PRATSFOO") closed was that nobody was really going there to buy pizza. Being an office building where most of the companies have something to do with IT, and because IT people are so lazy, everybody was simply ordering pizza on phone. Needless to say, the Pizza Restaurant across the street didn't take orders on phone. This turned out to be a fatal design flaw (*). As I've already explained, the solution to this design flaw was the replacement of the pizza owens with coffee-making machines. Now, since almost every company which has something to do with IT has a coffee machine in the office, I seriously doubt the success of the upcoming Cafe, but that is not the point here.
People tend to be lazy. If presented with a set of options, they will most likely chose the one which involves less walking, moving, writing and thinking. For one product to be successfull, it has to be simple and straightforward. It has to fullfill a function and nothing more. (products which fullfill more functions than most people need appeal to another category, which is usually called "geeks")
With the in mind, the success of Apple's MacOS X is truly a notable exception.
Designed to be nice, clean and sometimes annoyingly straightforward, the operating system appeals to that no-nonsense category of people who buy iPods (because they are cute and trendy), P&S digicams (because they are trendy) and other - you name it (because it is trendy or cute) - underfeatured appliances. On the other hand, Apple's MacOS X comes with a strong Unix core under the hood. A hood which can be accessed the geeks and the like. So if you come to think of it, being both no-nonsense and having thousand of hidden functions under the hood is probably the main reason behind Mac OS X' success.
Back to our friends from across the street, the geek in me can't help thinking: how about a Cafe which also does pizza with home delivery?
PS: WiFi in the Cafe would also be nice.
(*) - suggested further reading on fatal design flaws and other frightening things: all of Steve McConnell's books.
Posted by Costin Raiu at November 27, 2005 7:30 PM
Comments
I totally agree with you about Mac OS X. Proof: I run more than one year Linux on my iBook and then I finally really tried Mac OS X. Half a year later I erased the Linux partition. :P I sould say it's a different kind of life and which takes some time to adjust to it but in the end I learned to like it. I just hope I get some time and play a little with Cocoa. :-)
PS: Signing to post a comment is such a pain... :-(
Posted by: Razvan Musaloiu-E. 
at November 28, 2005 3:31 AM