John Gruber, on Daring Fireball:
By focusing on A.T. [“Aunt Tillie,” the archetypal nontechnical user], Raymond is ignoring the actual depth of the problem. It’s easy to say, The open source community needs to do better, we need to create software A.T. can use. But they’re so far away from this right now that even an expert like Eric Raymond can’t figure out how to use their software.
The “I thought I was the only one” letters that Raymond found so interesting aren’t coming from the A.T.-set; they’re coming from Linux geeks who read essays written by Eric Raymond. And they’re frustrated by open source software’s terrible usability. The problem isn’t just that dear old A.T. can’t use desktop Linux — the problem is that even Linux geeks have trouble figuring it out.
An interesting perspective on a decades-old problem.
(via pxlnv.com)