[REBOL] Re: About View "Skinz" Contest
From: tbrownell:shaw:ca at: 25-Feb-2002 3:40
Winamp is for Windows and Mac. It's true that 'many' people use
windows, but I don't know how you can make an Mp3 player for view without
multiplying the effort times the number of OS's people use/want. And I'll
explain why it's a waste of time trying...
<The "Why use Winamp" rant...>
I personally couldn't care less what OS I use, as long as it does what I
want to some degree of consistancy. I've been using computers since high
school in 1975. We had an IBM with a one line led display for the output,
and which required punching (marking with a pencil) cards, lining up behind
30 other students, feeding them through a reader, then approaching the
teacher to help 'debug' your 40 line/40 cards BASIC program, only to find
you marked "qrint" instead of "print".
My first computer was an Atari 800 with with 8Kb of ram (upgradeable to
a max of 16Kb for something like $400 1976 dollars... about $2000 today
dollars :) which used a cassette tape deck for saving/loading your program.
Took 15 minutes or more to load the simplest program. I still remember when
the first HD's came out, 5MB! That was just incredible. Who would ever
fill a 5mb hard drive??? And they cost, if I recall, $5000. Yes, $5000 for
5mb.
Then I got a Commodore 64 (64Kb ram) and the rest is history, with my
latest acquistion being 1Ghz laptop.
I've seen it all as far as desktop/PC computing goes. And frankly, this
whole "my OS is better than your OS" spew is tiring. I don't care. I
couldn't care less if MS went under tomorrow, or if it became the only OS
out there. Frankly, I never cared about Apple one iota. They sold nice,
incredibly expensive PC's that no average person could afford. If Apple had
a cheap clone back in those days, there would'nt be an MS today. Now they,
Apple, have 2.3% of the market. 2.3 PERCENT? Who are these people?
All I care about is "What are people using today?" and what OS should I
make software for first?
So, to answer that question lets turn to the facts... Here's a great
site to do just that called "Geeks with Guns"
http://geekswithguns.com/index.html
According to these stats, the Windows OS counts for 94.3%, Mac at 2.3%,
Linux 2% and Unix 0.3% with all the rest at 1.0%
Someone earlier complained about a floating frame on my website.
Floating frames are cool, but only work with IE, and considering that IE
counts for 93% of all browsers out there, I'm willing, at this time, to
abandon the 7% of the rest. Then there's one more reason for Netscape users
to abandon it.
At this time, for better or worse, Microsoft is the defacto standard.
If you are creating software for any other OS, you have seriously gimped
your market share. (Unless your creating something that is lacking in the
other OS, of which there is plenty... including Winamp)
This is not about which OS is better, this is about why even you, yes
you.. are using MS products. And don't tell me you don't, cause the numbers
speak for themselves.
Oops, I'm mistaken. In a room with 1000 'average' computer users, 23
are Mac users, 20 Linux, 3 Unix and 10 everything else.
And I'll bet you my Windows 2000 OS that the flames I receive on this
post won't be from the 944 Windows users.
So, why use Winamp?
Why not.
<end rant, have a nice day>
TB
PS - Windows XP sucks. Don't know about Linux, haven't used it... probably
sucks too.
