OS Popularity

I had a question the other day: If everyone forgot everything they knew about computers, how many people would still be using Windows?

Imagine that you decided you were going to completely remodel your bathroom. Not being an expert on bathrooms, you don't know much about the various toilets, sinks, and bathtubs available, so you talk to a salesman, and he helps you pick out something that you think will work well. Then he says that you have a choice between the electric blue and lime green varieties of toilet paper. Let's assume that they look equally absurd, and you don't prefer one for its color. The salesman tells you that 90% of people buy the electric blue type. Naturally, you choose the blue, because you assume that if all those people use it, it must be the best.

But what you don't know is going to hurt you. Had you taken the time to do your research, you would have found out that electric blue toilet paper dyes your toilet a funny color, clogs the drain on a regular basis, and occasionally even spontaneously explodes. On the other hand, the green kind almost never clogs the toilet, contains much more toilet paper on the same roll, and doesn't lose its dye.

Making the situation even more complicated is the existence of the burnt orange variety of toilet paper. It is completely free, allows you to control the exact amount of toilet paper you want to put on a roll (allowing for dispensers of different sizes), lets you refill your toilet paper roll any time you want, and clogs your toilet only in very exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, you can't buy it along with your bathroom--you have to install it yourself later. You also need to read the short manual in order to learn how to use it correctly. And the existence of this toilet paper is never even mentioned when you buy your toilet. A small number of people find out about and properly set up their orange toilet paper and are very happy with it, but when they try to tell others about the great toilet paper they found, those people only laugh and say, "Wait--you had to read a manual to use your toilet paper?"

Now I'm going to add some additional factors to the toilet paper debate.
1. The lime green toilet paper is significantly more expensive than the blue kind. The orange kind is still free.
2. People can break your toilet's security and damage or make your toilet paper unusable.
3. Occasionally, all types of toilet paper will stop working. However, green and orange toilet paper do this less often, and can usually be recovered within a couple of minutes. Orange toilet paper has the potential to be wrecked beyond repair if used improperly, but will almost never break of its own accord.
4. Once you have selected a type of toilet paper, you cannot use another one with the toilet without going through an hour-long process that converts it to a different type.
5. Blue toilet paper is much easier to find than green and orange toilet paper, and it's very likely that your neighbor will have some blue toilet paper you can borrow if you run out, but (due to their lesser popularity), this is often not true with other types.
6. People who normally use a different type of toilet paper may have difficulty using yours. People who prefer orange toilet paper are usually used to all the different types, and will often have no problem. However, users of orange toilet paper are quite rare.

So, summarizing:
* Electric blue toilet paper is very unreliable--it damages your toilet, clogs it frequently, and sometimes even explodes. It often breaks and can be difficult to repair, and malicious people can easily damage your toilet paper. However, it is very common and you will nearly always be able to find some, and nearly everybody can use it without any trouble.
* Lime green toilet paper uses different concepts than blue toilet paper, so people may experience a slight learning curve changing from one to the other. However, it's just as easy to learn to use as blue toilet paper, and is significantly more reliable. Unfortunately, only a small number of people use it, so your use of green toilet paper may annoy people, and you may have difficulty finding more when you run out. It's also the most expensive type of toilet paper.
* Burnt orange toilet paper is uncommon, but it allows you to do basically anything you want with it. It requires reading a short manual to familiarize yourself with its workings, and also needs a small amount of time to install and master. However, once you have done these things, you'll think it's great. It's also completely free.

I think we can all agree on the fact that if popularity concerns were removed, the blue toilet paper is an absolutely terrible deal and nobody would use it. Lime green and burnt orange toilet paper would then be the serious contenders. In this case, I would expect that roughly the same number of people would choose to use green toilet paper as orange. People who are willing to spend some money and don't like learning things would choose lime green toilet paper, while those who want to save their money and are willing to work a little bit to have better control of their toilet would choose orange toilet paper. In this situation, the issue of people having difficulty using other types of toilet paper would also be diminished--with only two types of toilet paper in use, and without one having a near-total monopoly, people would learn the basics of how to use the other type properly, even if they didn't like it much.

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If you didn't get it yet, electric blue toilet paper represents Windows, lime green toilet paper represents the Mac OS X, and burnt orange toilet paper represents Linux. I may have exaggerated a bit on the instability of Windows, but I honestly have never used another operating system that occasionally chooses to melt down at an inopportune time and sit there with a guilty blue screen facing me. Although occasional slow performance and bugs are a fact of life with computers, Windows also seems to have more of them than any other operating system. And it's not like Windows has a terribly innovative interface or anything else to particularly recommend it, either. It does, as with blue toilet paper, have a wide user base (although more and more new college students, for one, are beginning to purchase Macs), and is compatible with nearly everything. Even that advantage is beginning to change, as more devices provide Linux drivers, more cross-platform software is developed, and the amount of extremely useful free software (free as in freedom, not as in free beer), much of which works on any system, increases daily.

What do you think? If you had to relearn everything you knew about computers and you knew nothing about the popularity (or compatibility, although as I mentioned, that's beginning to be less and less important) of operating systems, but only their features, which would you choose? Let me know in the comments.

--
Soren "scorchgeek" Bjornstad
http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com
Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question.
The answer is "No."

Copyright 2010 Soren Bjornstad.
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