How to Get Me to Like Your Software
After hearing all the brouhaha about Google Chrome, I went and looked at their website. Initially, I was skeptical as to whether I would ever use it insted of Firefox, until I saw their comic. Normally, this would be insanely corny, but they pulled it off quite well, which led me to an observation as to the nature of my choices of software:
I will tend to never replace software I already use with equvalent software no matter how much third parties praise it, unless the developer(s) do a good job of presenting to me proof that they are not idiots.
Google’s team did this in the comic because they were heavily promoting totally geeky/technical things as reasons that their product was awesome. For instance, talk about UI improvements was about 7 of the 38 pages of the comic. The entirety of the rest of the comic is about how awesome their one-process-one-tab model was, or how they architected their browser testing process, etc.
The moral of the story here is that I am now using Google Chrome as my main browser on Windows (instead of Firefox), despite the lack of things such as Adblock Plus, because I identify more closely with the Google developers than with the Mozilla developers, especially after reading their Bugzilla.
Another example of this was Git, a version control system which I only started using after watching Linus’s Google Tech Talk, where he spends most of his time bashing subversion not for being ‘uncool’ or for having a bad UI, but for the asymptotically inefficient algorithms they use for merging, while explaining that, since he decided to work on thise areas, he was able to get good ‘big Oh’ algorithms, which lead to merges taking fractions of a second rather than whole seconds (a big deal for Linus). Again, although I was happy with Subversion, I switched to git pretty much soley because Linus convinced me that he was not an idiot.
There you have it — now you know how to make me use your replacement for Google, etc.
