Re: User-Friendly Names

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 11:22, Ross Burton wrote:
> 
> One thing I've always wondered is why products with odd names is seen as
> a bad unix thing...
> 
> Are these product names sensible and clearly state what they are:
> ...
> 
> Admittedly Microsoft have been getting better recently, with Media
> Player and Messenger.
>

All those names are nonsense. This is an issue of branding vs.
usability. Microsoft tends to choose branding forfeiting usability,
because they can. They have a big enough advertising machine which has
effectively allowed them to make "Word" synonymous with word processing
and "powerpoint" synonymous with presentations. However in gnome we
don't have such power and we should choose to go with usability.
Incidentally i think one major improvement may be the introduction of
task based menus to supplement the current application based ones. I
think it could be shown that tasks => browse the web or tasks => compose
a document, may be alot easier for users to pick up than having to
search through the applications menu.

dave