WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Ugliness of the Unfamiliar [WebTech]

I was sitting helping Alastair with his homework just now and encountered a common problem. He was typing an essay for his English homework and was cursing the word processor because, unlike the one he was familiar with, it didn't have the font he wanted. The culprit in his mind was OpenOffice.org 1.0.1, the office suite I have installed in the kitchen (shared) computer. In fact, the problem was that the computer is new (the last one had a motherboard failure) and the font he likes, 'Wide Latin', is not one of those installed by Windows 98 by default. But in his mind, the issue was that the package he was familiar with, Microsoft Word, was not installed on the computer and he was being forced to use something apparently inferior because it did not have the font he was used to.

It's my belief that this problem, the ugliness of the unfamiliar, is the biggest threat to the adoption of non-monopoly software. Every time the user finds something unfamiliar, they treat it as bug in the new rather than either learning the alternative approach or discovering the true defect in the underlying system. It's depressing to see this week all the stories about the critical defects in Microsoft's virtual machine being headlined and reported (two different activities by two different writers by the way) as bugs in 'Java'. The story linked even tells users to do the worst possible thing in response:

Microsoft said the most serious of the flaws could enable a website to compromise a user's system and perform actions such as changing data, loading and running programs, and reformatting the hard disk. According to Microsoft's website the vulnerabilities range from one that is rated "critical" to others that are "important", "moderate" and "low." It said users should scrap older versions of Java VM and install the latest version.

Users would be much better served to install the Java Plug-in from Sun, which avoids the problem by complying with the Java specifications.

The really grievous issue here of course is that the bugs Microsoft is fixing relate to the use of their platform integration, built in violation of their contract with Sun, proving to give unauthorised access outside the sandbox and into the host computer - something I remember commenting on at the time as unhealthy and dangerous (I worked for IBM at the time). I, we all in the Java community, were right to be concerned then and it's clear that Sun were right to take court action against the issue too.

posted at 7:49 PM (UK) | |