[geeks] [rescue] VirtualBox anecdotes - was Re: A wee bit off-topic

[Lionel Peterson]

Most surveys I've seen for market share are skewed by design - either how
browsers self-identify (leading to usage marketshare, skewing heavily towards
personal web browsing platforms), how web servers self-identify (leading to
server marketshare, but skewed towards web servers), or sales figures (skewed
towards corporate refresh purchases). In order, such surveys favor Windows,
Linux, and finally windows again, unless mobile phones are added, then android
gets a big boost from what I've observed.

Lionel

> On Jun 22, 2015, at 10:32 AM, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net> wrote:
>
>> On 06/21/15 15:51, Dave McGuire wrote:
>>  Yep...With enough money, one can buy a survey to "prove" anything one
>> wants to prove.
>>
>>  Personally, in my daily socio-business circles, I know precisely THREE
>> people who use Windows.  That makes for about 10%.  Granted I don't have
>> the patience to suffer stupid people readily, and I don't hang out with
>> gamers, but there's a data point.
>
>
> We are, howevever, a sufficiently atypical set of data points that the
> data is of relatively little significance to the composition of the
> massive consumer userbase.  On this curve, we are well out on the long
> tail.  A shocking proportion of business users are, frankly, so
> abysmally technically ignorant about computers that they believe
> anything the shiniest brochure tells them.
>
> My primary contact for one of my employer's customers is a woman so
> computer illiterate that every problem to be resolved takes ten times as
> long as it needs to, because she apparently doesn't understand big words
> like "replication" and "schema".  Half of every conversation on the
> phone with her consists of me searching for ever simpler ways to explain
> the issue in the support ticket, while she repeats "You know I'm not
> technical."  She wields her ignorance like a bludgeon, but will not hand
> off the ticket to one of her developers who actually understands the
> issue.  (Why, I don't know.  Maybe she can't delegate, maybe she can't
> part with the "prestige" of being the person who <s>obstructs
> communication</s> er, communicates with a major service provider.)
> Granted she is an extreme case in the opposite direction ... but she is
> not alone.  I've had tickets I could make no sense of until I finally
> had the flash of insight that when the customer SAID "restore", the
> customer MEANT "dump".  To which the customer angrily retorted, "IT'S
> THE SAME THING!"  No, dear customer, it is not.  It is in fact the exact
> opposite.
>
> I know people who have relatives who honestly believe that you cannot
> get Internet service unless you have a phone line and a dial-up modem.
> I know people who truly believe that the thing with the piece of glass
> in the front is the computer, and the big rectangular box is just the
> hard drive.  Is it any surprise that people with this level of technical
> ignorance, possibly aided and abetted by MBAs, honestly believe that
> whatever the biggest corporation tells them is the best must be the best?
>
>
> There's a quotation I have somewhere.  I don't remember who it was, but
> the gist of it was this:
> "Windows is crap.  This crap runs 95% of the computers on the planet ...
> but it's still crap."
>
>
> --
>  Phil Stracchino
>  Babylon Communications
>  phils at caerllewys.net
>  phil at co.ordinate.org
>  Landline: 603.293.8485
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