wgarcia said: How can't you get a patronizing tone when again and again the same unfounded criticisms pop up, such as Why does Ubuntu not support non-accelerating graphic cards any more? or Why has Ubuntu abandoned Gnome?
Well, the complication with the crossroads that Ubuntu finds itself at, is that it now has two classes of incoming criticisms to deal with, one class comes from the diehard Linux community, and the other comes from the newbie users (or potential users).
The first group will bitch about graphics cards and architectural legacy issues and toolsets, and Shuttleworth's approach to dealing with them is to ignore them. His point is that Ubuntu has to reach out to the wider population if its going to reach its full potential, and that setting aside the wants of this group in the past has gotten Ubuntu to a very, very successful place in v10.xx. Ubuntu can't be designed for Linux geeks, or its only audience will be Linux geeks. They "don't get it".
The second group are the newbies coming from the Windows environment. They're the target audience, the 90%. Those people have different complaints, like, how do I move the launcher bar, how do I get back the menu behaviour that I'm used to, why do these icons look horrible, and how do I change them, and why does this list of things not seem to work properly. These are reasonable questions, but unfortunately, those users get given the same reply that Canonical have for the Linx geeks -- suck it up, you don't "get it", the system we're implementing is the best possible system even if you don't understand it, trust us, we know what we're doing, we know that the current system is great because it's built from pieces that we took from Win7 and OSX, and those companies employ professional designers. If you don't like it, you can always use a different linux distro.
Now, the snag is, for the target audience, most of these responses aren't approriate. Tell the average end-user that they're too lazy to look up the information on google and find it on a third-party tech forum, and they're liable to think, no, YOU'RE too lazy to put the information where it ought to be, in the OS itself. Tell them that they need to experiment with other linux distros, and they'll think, to hell with this, the reason I decided to try Ubuntu was because people told me that this was the verison of Linux that actually worked and was user-friendly, and I'm not about to spend my precious evenings and weekends downloading and installing six different linux versions just to find something that might be adequate, when I'm not a computer hobbyist and don't actually give a damn about the operating system, I just want something that works and lets me find stuff without constantly tripping me up.
Most human beings aren't IT professionals, and while forum regulars might find it frustrating that these people are too "stupid" to dig a set of configuration info out of a tech site and use it to solve their problem, you have to remember that the same goes for every other consumer product. You might as well complain that car buyers are too lazy and too stupid to learn metallurgy and hydrocarbon chemistry in order to understand the best way to treat their engines, or that nobody should be allowed to buy a house without first passing exams in carpentry, plumbing bricklaying and electrics.
The attitude that people have to mass-market software is that if something doesn't work properly, it should have been fixed at source. In the age of mass production, it's more efficient for one person to fix the problem at its source, than to expect 300,000 end-users to each look up their problem on Google and apply the workaround themselves. Each of those users will get peed off, not just because of the time //they// just wasted, but because they know that that that unnecessary waste is being replicated across the user-base, and that it's all because someone, somewhere didn't do their job properly. It's a waste of society's resources.
So, Shuttleworth's basically in a similar position to where Tony Blair was towards the end of his Premiership. Blair had the same issue, he had a dedicated user-base (the Labour Party) who didn't understand that policy had to be designed to appeal to a wider user-base if it was going to be successful. So he ignored their complaints and pressed ahead based on personal conviction, and it was a very sucessful strategy. The problem that Blair then hit was that when he started making genuinely bad decisions, he had no internal compass to tell him that he was going off the rails, and when everyone was telling him that he was being stupid, well, he knew that you always get doubters and critics and the thing to do was not to listen to them. So Blair ended up making stupid mistakes, that almost everyone on the country apart from him and his immediate clique knew were //obviously// stupid mistakes (like not taking the opportinity to excercise the imigration-limiting option that Britain was offered when the Eastern European countries joined the EU).
Blair didn't have enough experience of personal failure to be able to tell when he was in the middle of a disaster, even when it was painfully obvious to almost everybody else, and since he'd learnt to ignore criticism, he had no way of telling when he'd gone disastrously off-track. He turned from being a popular leader that people pinned their hopes on as someone who stuck up for the needs of the general population, to someone that the electorate loathed for not listening to them. Blair spent a lot of time in his last months complaining that commentators and voters and journalists just "didn't get it", whereas in fact, the one person who didn't "get it" was him.
I think Canonical may be sufferring from Tony Blair syndrome, they had such a brilliant run of successes up to 10.xx that it seemed that they could do nothing wrong, and they didn't really understand what project failure felt like. Since their success was partly based on ignoring the protests of their core community and trusting their own convictions, they've they've grown a habit of thinking that user-protests are just ignorant noise, and that they automatically know better than the users when the users complain.
But, like Blair, they're not making a sufficient distinction between the protests of the "old users" whose views represent a narrow and unrepresentative interest group that can be set aside, and those of the broader electorate, whose needs it is that the project is supposed to be looking after.
The user is not always wrong. Often, yes. But not always.