Microsoft is getting to blow this one, though. The Office 12 interface is brand new, and many users see it as a major annoyance. At the same time, Linux is getting its act together, The Portland Project, a working group of all the major Linux desktop players, is helping develop not just common APIs (application programming interfaces), but common user interfaces as well.
While I'm not a particularly big fan of Office 12, I'm going to weigh in on this remark.
I've watched my mom use Office for a long time. I'm a big user of shortcut keys - I figured out by the time I was 15 that the shortcut keys for superscript and subscript were CTRL+SHIFT+= and CTRL+=, respectively, and to increase a font size press CTRL+] (CTRL+[ decreases). I learned these things because it was taking forever to do it manually for chemistry homework.
Back to my mom. I made her a list of common keyboard shortcuts. I taped them to her screen. She still uses the mouse to get around. Whereas I compulsively type ALT+F, S to save my documents, she either clicks the disk icon or goes to the file menu to click Save.
I think that for the general luser population the interface change will be good. Microsoft (if you read their developers documentation) is changing its user interface focus to task-based workflow, which has evidently been the result of the last ten years of psychological studies and focus groups. Their new documentation strategy is a "What would you like to do?" strategy, with topics for tasks instead of the traditional help system.
It'll really piss off current power users the most, which will be the people who write the articles and whatnot, because while they haven't changed *too* much around, there's just enough to be annoying. Like the Format menu in Word is no longer Alt+O, so knowing that the paragraph dialog was Alt+O, P screws me up. I haven't actually done anything substantive in Word 2007 though, so I don't know if there's even a paragraph dialog box anymore. So yeah, I hate the new menu (or "ribbons" if that's what you're referring to), but I'll get used to it.
I also think that the sheer number of distributions is what also tears Linux apart. When you buy Windows, you buy just that. Windows. When you install a Linux distro, there are so many different variations of what you could get. Your average home user isn't gonna like that.
That's an interesting point. Plus software comes in many varieties for each specific distro, and I've run into not being able to find software for a distro that I was using. Like, while I love fedora core, I can't find XMMS for it. Or I can't get it to compile. Or something. It's frustrating.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
