This seems a more common trend. Windows really was the exception, where they aimed to please neither professionals, nor "average consumers", but this mythical "poweruser".

They didnt exist, Microsoft created them. And that was not a good thing. Many of them had a beaten wife syndrome: they became experts because even doing mundane trivial tasks, like burning a cd, organising your documents, installing software, required "poweruser level skills". Now they are afraid of change. They worry, they have to relearn all they know. They prefer to stick to the man they already know. Sure, he may beat them, but after all these years they know where its going hurt, and what his triggers are. Who knows how much more another man will beat them?

Im glad Microsoft is cleaning ship, and i understand that the windows "power users" will need counseling. I dont like the walled garden future though. But wouldnt it be great if my mom buys a new pc and she was actually capable of doing things with it, like she can with her ipad, without needing the assistance of a power user?

So, there i stand: death to the poweruser. They have to either man up and get professional, or lounge in the casual area, but lets not have them keep things back. From people being scared of shortcuts or powerusers dismissing linux because they have nightmares of terminal commands. Grow a pair, or embrace the new usability for casual users.

>Im glad Microsoft is cleaning ship, and i understand that the windows "power users" will need counseling.

I think the subtext of these posts is that time will tell if they're cleaning ship or just filling it with a whole new generation of powerusers around a system designed primarily for casual use. That's nothing to say if casual users find it useful either. Ultimately the whole casual/power user is sort of a false dichotomy. On a long enough curve, all users are powerusers for their case.

I agree that time will tell if they were able to clean the ship succesfully. But all the complaining about how radical the changes are for powerusers at least suggest they are honestly trying for once.

I like the curve analogy. It seems to suggest that good UI is like a partial ordering of usecases, where there is a clear relationship between complexity, position on the learning curve and popularity of the usecase.

From that perspective one might say the traditional windows desktop starts off its learning curve with too much complexity and puts system maintainance tasks too far down on the curve.

What I don't like is that Windows is forcing users into a specific interface paradigm. In the Linux world, most distributions offer a wide variety of desktop paradigms, so when Ubuntu wanted to switch to Unity, users were just a couple of clicks away from logging into Ubuntu Classic (Gnome2), or if they don't like any of the ones that come pre-installed, they can easily install others. That way, you can have one computer with a "traditional" interface (Gnome2, qvwm...), an innovative interface (Gnome3, Unity...), and different types that just never got mainstream attention (xmonad, Awesome ...)

Besides giving users choice and creating competition, this allows people to experiment and inovate with new systems with much less risk than Windows model of forcing people to use their latest and hoping for the best.