Interesting article here about difficulties of switching end users from Windows to Linux:
Six months later," 80% of users have and had no problem with OpenOffice," Holt said.
Unfortunately, the other 20% have fouled the nest. One had some minor issues with a table inserted into a document and others reported number of everyday formatting issues. This vocal minority has rebelled against OpenOffice.
The OpenOffice migration is floundering, as, once again, some employees have returned to using MS Word.
Microsoft’s mindshare with some employees has been harder to overcome than the problems with the table and formatting. Holt now knows that the success of an OpenOffice migration can depend on early identification and deprogramming of employees who are fiercely loyal to MS Office. "Just one person like this may upset the whole project," he said.
Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption, By Jan Stafford, 09 Feb 2006, SearchOpenSource.com
The article has a number of specific tidbits about problems encountered, and some speculations about how many of these problems are orchestrated by Microsoft, either directly through impeding OEMs from supplying anything else, or indirectly by convincing users that only Microsoft is good enough. That latter reminds me of the old days, when nobody ever went wrong by buying IBM.
And it reminds me of something else I just read.
A recent paper in behavioral economics reports that for every human group they studied:
We find that our subjects fall into three types, an individual’s type is stable, and a group’s cooperative outcomes can be remarkably well predicted if one knows its type composition. Reciprocal types, who contribute to the public good as a positive function of their beliefs about others’ contributions, constitute the majority (63%) of players; cooperators and free-riders are also present in our subject population.
Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations Robert Kurzban and Daniel Houser, Published online before print January 21, 2005, 10.1073/pnas.0408759102 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Specifically, the proportions are:
13% co-operators, 20% free-riders and 63% reciprocators
Are you a player or a strategy? by Alex Tabarrok on January 22, 2005
See also this writeup on the paper in the Economist: Evolution and games playing, Jan 20th 2005
I’m sure this 20% free-riders and the 20% of nest-foulers is just coincidence.
OK, I’m sure I’d like to see some research to see if it’s a coincidence of not.
If it’s not a coincidence, the paper seems to indicate another solution: get rid of the free-riders, and the whole group will be much more cooperative, regardless of what software it uses.
-jsq