14 Apr
2011
14 Apr
'11
1:03 p.m.
--- On Thu, 4/14/11, geoffrey oltmans <oltmansg at bellsouth.net> wrote:
I don't believe that is necessarily
always true, but I think it is generally
true that commercial software tends to have better quality,
at least among the
applications that a typical end user would use. Now, back
office stuff, or
utilities sure... that stuff tends to be pretty good
quality. In general though
I think one thing that is particularly lacking in OSS is
good user interfaces,
probably because a lot of it is targeted towards techies,
and there's a general
sense that, if you don't like it, change it yourself, RTFM,
etc.
It's definitely not always true - case in point, Microsoft Office 2010. That'a
about as user-facing as it gets, and what a train wreck that mess of an interface is! I
could forgive them if it was an early graphical application and nobody had thought of
things like drop-down menus yet, but as a modern piece of supposedly business quality
software, it falls flat on it's face. At least they fixed Excel so you can have more
than 65,535 rows.
At least, with the open source stuff, if one interface is especially terrible, someone
will write another one.
-Ian