On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 21:37 +1000, Basil Chupin wrote:
Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
YaST, YUM, RUG, APT, SYNAPTIC, SMART, etc.
What's wrong with this picture?
OK. Perhaps I'm getting old. And do not get me wrong. I like choice. But are so many different tools really needed?
Too much choice is actually a BAD thing.
We have a TV science program 9called Catalyst on the ABC) which broadcast a few weeks ago an experiment conducted by the psychology department of one of our Universities (the one I went to :-) ) where they had on display some 30 samples of jams; people were asked to sample these and then buy the jam(s) they liked. Nobody bought any jams.
Then the sample of jams was reduced to just several and people again were asked to taste and buy the jam(s) of their choice. Many sales of the jams were made.
The result of the experiment was that when faced with a multi-choice situation people did not make any selections and walked away from purchases because they did not want to make a mistake and possibly buy the wrong product; so rather than be sorry later that they could have bought a better tasting jam they bought nothing instead - and the same applies to all other products.
Can you, or anyone else here, relate to this? I can.
I can. Having said that, I think that if there was only one jam - no matter how good - a similar result could have been seen. When given no choice one feels trapped and avoids the purchase for that reason. I suspect software does not work like jam. But people are people all the time. In the case of SUSE update tools, I think time will weed out the less usable / feature rich tools. As that progresses, I would like to see what the tools can do. I would offer to make a table, but I know too little about them to provide useful info. Perhaps if we just started listing features seen in any of these tools, a start at a table could be made. -- Roger Oberholtzer