I know you’ve all seen this before if you’ve worked with many IT people…the ‘I’m too technical for you’ attitude that many in the industry have. From purposely using tech-speak that is way beyond a customers level to blatant disrespect that somebody doesn’t know how to do some simple task. I used to have a customer who ran his own business(es) and dealt (capably, I presume as I believe he was quite wealthy) with many different aspects of those, but he just didn’t know jack about computers. I was always happy to work on his computer as it was usually some extremely simple little thing and he would end up praising me up & down for saving him. Same thing with AOLer’s and Linux noobs. I personally would never have any AOL software installed on my computer, but how many subscribers do they have now? Is it 9 million? That’s 9 million people that now have a computer and internet access that are potential customers to someone like myself! And Linux…I work in a Novell shop and so have been working with Suse Linux to become familiar with it. I use it because of the potential corporate connection, but I’m not ‘married’ to it, and would be happy to install any other distro if needed. But at a local Linux business meeting a couple months ago, the presenter (a hardcore Linux developer) seemed rather cold at my mention of Suse, like he didn’t consider that a ‘real’ distro since Novell purchased it. Same situation as AOL basically, Novell’s direction with Suse has brought a large audience over to take a look at Linux, so I would think that no matter what ties to any particular distro you have, having a few million more people jump into Linux would be a nice step for the greater good of the entire Linux community. These are just my specific examples, I’m not trying to start a war over AOL or Linux distros. My basic idea boils down to ‘more people using technology = more opportunity for me when they have problems’ I’ll be glad to try to ‘educate’ if they want, but far from being disgusted by people who don’t know how to use technology, I would love to meet as many as I could that needed all the help they can get.
