A newbie wants to configure nothing and let the OS do everything for him. A shiny, colourful interface is required.
A novice user wants to do some more things himself but still need some guidance.
An experienced user wants to have access to nearly every part of the OS and doesn't care about the design of the interface as much as the newbie user.
This leads to the contradiction that for the newbie user the more advanced configuration options must be kept out of sight while the experienced user needs to access those options. OS's usually don't have some function which measures the experience level of the user so how can you do this? I've already seen the results of this 'shielding' in WinME: 6 options in control panel and the most useless, but flashy, add-ons for the interface, like a skinnable W(I)MP 7.0 and other eye-candy.
Why not make one version for beginners, one for more experienced users and another version for the 'gurus'? It's one of the main things which keeps bugging me in Win9x/ME: lack of access to configuration settings etc.
Win2k is in that view an OS for the experienced user and less suitable for newbies, but it still isn't targeted solely at experienced users.
When you look at Linux, you see that all distributions all have their own 'experience-level requirements'. Mandrake is for beginners and distro's like SuSe and Slackware are more for the powerusers.
So now is my question: why does Microsoft, Apple and the makers of BeOS try to combine three (maybe even more) OS's for three different experience-levels into one OS? Is it only to save $$$ (development costs) or is there another reason?
A novice user wants to do some more things himself but still need some guidance.
An experienced user wants to have access to nearly every part of the OS and doesn't care about the design of the interface as much as the newbie user.
This leads to the contradiction that for the newbie user the more advanced configuration options must be kept out of sight while the experienced user needs to access those options. OS's usually don't have some function which measures the experience level of the user so how can you do this? I've already seen the results of this 'shielding' in WinME: 6 options in control panel and the most useless, but flashy, add-ons for the interface, like a skinnable W(I)MP 7.0 and other eye-candy.
Why not make one version for beginners, one for more experienced users and another version for the 'gurus'? It's one of the main things which keeps bugging me in Win9x/ME: lack of access to configuration settings etc.
Win2k is in that view an OS for the experienced user and less suitable for newbies, but it still isn't targeted solely at experienced users.
When you look at Linux, you see that all distributions all have their own 'experience-level requirements'. Mandrake is for beginners and distro's like SuSe and Slackware are more for the powerusers.
So now is my question: why does Microsoft, Apple and the makers of BeOS try to combine three (maybe even more) OS's for three different experience-levels into one OS? Is it only to save $$$ (development costs) or is there another reason?
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