Jan 20 2007 at 2:26pm
Liam broke my site! Plus some stuff on platform independence.
Hubsands, totally useless aren’t they? Just kidding 
Liam was trying to get my old domain to redirect properly and – oops – accidentally deleted my entire site and database! He blames evil Plesk.
I did lose a few posts and some comments that were posted on the Prioritizing Web Usability book review (which was, thankfully, completely written and stored before Christmas!). I even lost the post about all the books we got for Christmas. Maybe I can make him rewrite that for me. Yeah, that’s a good punishment 
In one of the lost comments on the Prioritizing Web Usability book review, Adam K. said:
That’s interesting that Nielsen believes that cross platform issues will ‘go away’ because Apple usage will decline. If anything, I think that Apple will make leaps and bounds in the coming years due to the iPod being so popular, and possibly the iPhone ( even though $600 for a phone is a bit much to me ).
Linux on the other hand, I think will keep on with the geek crowd, but it’s not going to ‘take down Microsoft’ like you see on Digg every other day. Hopefully, if anything, cross platform problems will go away because Microsoft, Apple, and the Gnome/KDE guys will finally sit down and agree on common layers.
I thought that was an odd comment as well. I’m also hearing a lot of excitement about Apple from regular people in my office. One of our managers got a new Mac at home and loves it, and others are raving about the one we just got from the tech area to play with. Others in the tech group have been trying them out at home too. People are really excited about Apple these days, and I think that will carry over into their desktop market, especially now that they aren’t as expensive. Over the summer they couldn’t keep the little laptops in stock at the campus computer store.
For Linux, I agree that it will mostly stay in the realm of geeks unless they make some major usability improvements. On the other hand, I am hearing more about linux for regular people. The director of our department at work has been asking a lot of qustions about it lately, for example. He’s actually considering it! Which is really cool coming from a middle manager. At Christmas time my uncle mentioned that he’s installing linux on the computer my 13 year-old cousin uses. Too much spyware and viruses got into the Windows system she was using.
So there is some interest from regular people now, and I think there is more in other parts of the world. Especially from governments and educational groups (which is why I mentioned it in my book review – there could be more growth for Linux in countries where a lot of growth in interent use is happening). Liam knows more about this, maybe I’ll get him to write a comment.
But, there are also a lot of people who think that platforms won’t matter in a few years because everything will be on the web. MS is desperately trying to hang on to the desktop market with their new releases. Liam and I did a little preview of Office 2007 last night and I got the impression that they are sort of catering more towards power users. I thought that Word ’07 would be great for people who are writing a book or something but for regular people it’s total overkill.
Anyway, I definitely don’t agree with what Nielsen said there – I think that was another case of him making assumptions about something he very little about, which happens a few times in that book.
