Very Worried at MS .net

[markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk]

On 17 Jul, Alistair Davidson wrote:
>> I would, but life's too short to pay much attention to splashsnort.
>> Skimming it, I don't see what you're getting at.
> There are some quite interesting posts further down, by a user called
> anticypher. I don't know how much of what (s)he says is true though.

Most slashdot users don't know what they're talking about or are lying
anyway.</sweeping-generalisation>

> I think I'll stickj with Java for the time being. Now, if only that was
> maintained by an independent body...

I think all I'll say to that is 
http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/home/gat/lisp-study.html

>> > We don't have the time, MS are comming up to big and too fast.
>> They're an irrelevance, as ever.  Ignore them.
> I think we need to monitor what they're doing, but what we need to stop
> is obsessing about it so much. 

Much better put than I did, I think.  OK, we need to be aware of the
competition, but we shouldn't take our eyes off of the ball in order to
watch them 24-7.

> What we need to really start focusing on is coming up with new ideas for
> improving user friendliness IMHO. If we can innovate in technical areas
> we can do the same when it comes to user interfaces, and it's vital to
> do so- ultimately, your average user is far more interested in his/her
> system being easy to use than how fast or stable it is. It's the sad
> truth that they'll put up with several crashes a day to avoid using a
> command prompt.

I'm quite of the same opinion and I'd welcome being pointed towards a
general forum where such things can be discussed when relating to free
software.  I've been spending some time talking to the people behind
ROX http://rox.sourceforge.net/ as I was a great fan of RISCOS's
usability.  However, it seems that the interface left some significant
problems ignored: no icons, as far as I can tell or remember.

When we have both stability *and* interface, will anything stop us?