Today I went to the biweekly speaker presentation as part of Engineering Forum class to hear Kevin Maney speak about what he wrote in his new book: Trade-Off. He spoke about a trade-off between the fidelity and the convenience of products and ideas, and why some things work and others don't. To be clear about those two terms, we'll use his definitions of them (from memory, he didn't give hand-outs of the presentation):

fidelity

The total quality of the experience of something.

convenience

The ease of use and availability of something. (Including factors such as ubiquity and price)

He envisions a graph which looks like this:

It's fairly simple. A product is placed on the graph relative to others by comparing how convenient it is to the intended audience, and how good of an experience it turns out to be for that audience. Maney then proposes that the only significant innovations that really prosper are (in their time) in either the extreme of convenience, or that of fidelity. Now, to explain the circle on the graph, here's an example:

Live concerts of Michael Jackson's provided super-fidelity, because the experience would be something to remember all your life: the excitement, the sound, and actually seeing the great MJ on stage. Music on portable media via digital formats such as MP3 reduces the actual fidelity of the music, and removes every other aspect of the music experience other than the music itself. On the plus side, it's very convenient! It's cheap, small, and works on most devices (ignoring DRM). On the other hand CDs of the music, while they were in the far right area of the graph in the past, have drifted into the "fidelity belly", as Maney calls it.

This is a hi-fi belly. Not what I'm talking about.

The fidelity belly is where stale, boring stuff that doesn't prosper gets stuck. Stuff that had high fidelity once, perhaps, like the Razr. Or high convenience, like CDs. Maney went on to talk about how having both convenience and fidelity is impossible, and results in slipping towards boring, just as it happened to Starbucks (and your mother).

So, why am I mentioning all of this? Because midway through trying to fight an oncoming snooze during the lecture, the caffeine I drank hit me and my brain's gears creaked a bit, and I thought "let's apply this model to the open source world and see perhaps why it's being held down!" It's not very simple to apply it, because in the computer industry, the audience is really important, and open source products are all seeing different successes. However, let's look at a graphic for the "regular user" (read: from a 7 year old kid, to your average middle-aged guy, to your grandma that doesn't know what the difference betweeen left and right clicks is):

Sorry, Mac users, but who buys an overpriced computer to use an OS that is just as good?

I hope this graph makes sense. The problem? Maney wisely stated (and it appears to be true) that people tend to use stuff in the extremes of either fidelity and convenience, but never what's present on both. Hence, why Photoshop is more used than Gimp. IE more than Firefox. Chrome is a bit young, but that adds to its appeal! It's "cool" and "cutting edge" to use it.

Of note, Firefox and Chrome are so far above IE because of their key "killer features": speed, and (in Firefox's case) thousands of addons. This is a relative, not absolute, graph.

What about the OS Wars, though? The thing there is Windows's market dominance: most computers come pre-equipped with it! The rest are mostly Macs, and Ubuntu is easy to install, but that doesn't put either of them over Windows. This means that Windows's popularity is unchallenged, because it rests in the extreme, and neither Ubuntu nor Mac OS have a "killer feature" to make them go up in the fidelity scale. Windows is also higher than the two on fidelity because of the conveniences of all of the software that can be run on it. Now, in all seriousness, for a computer retailer, does it seem like a good decision to dump Windows for one of the other two (hopefully Ubuntu) evidently inferior OSes? Of course not!

I'll offer you a discount on Windows 7 if you trade in your soul. Image source.

So now what? Are open source OSes doomed to an eternity of playing the popularity game? Canonical won't be anywhere rich enough in the near future to challenge Microsoft's power of advertising. It won't get any more convenient, except perhaps some installer smoothing, and maybe making codecs work better without needing to spend half an hour working with gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad and gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly, which scares some new users. What Ubuntu needs is fidelity. It needs to be better, not more accessible. The latter will come with success, as will compatibility with more and more programs.

It needs a feature that drastically improves the user experience. Something the user loves and needs. And it needs to show users that they want it and need it.

Security and system efficiency doesn't mean anything to the lowest denominator of users. If an OS uses more, it means it's doing more and hence better. When that matters is when they actually try to see the contrast, and Windows just feels sluggish. With 7, though, that's not likely to be feelable.

So then what? The Ubuntu Software Center? Maybe, but it's a small step to just go online and download software from there. Ubuntu One? Maybe, but it needs more publicity, and maybe it doesn't count as open source. Compiz? A little inconvenient to get it to be really cool. Firefox by default? Come on, it only takes, like, half a minute to install it on any system!

None of these are enough. Especially not to pull users away from Windows. This isn't a proposition for an idea, it's a call for one. As the Engineering and Innovation Forum is probably supposed to do, it's got me thinking. I want you thinking too.

P.S. Non-Ubuntu Linux users will please excuse me for excluding them, but Ubuntu is the only Linux OS that is to the right of the Y axis on the scales used there.