I don't know about "Barbie's Dreamhouse", but Barbie Fashion Designer was a "mission critical app" for me when I bought my first Wintel box 2 years ago. Something about having little girls in the family. This is what lead me down the tortured path of "the integrity and uniformity of the Windows95 experience", for my own stuff just running NT would be fine. Strangely, Barbie FD wouldn't install on NT, though if you installed it under Win95 on a dual boot system, it ran without problem on NT. Presumably, that was Mattel's fault, not Microsoft's, but it certainly ended up giving me an education.
The thing about so-called "information appliances" is that I don't think, at the consumer level, many people are equipped to deal with Windows9x. Personally, I think it's fine, even nice, when everything's working right. A bit hyperfunctional and all that, which inevitably leads to confusion, but otherwise most things seem reasonably easy to use and manage, when they work right. On a pure simple administration level, for home use where security isn't a concern, it's easier than dealing with NT. And it's nice to have the universe of cheap mass-market software to play with.
When things go wrong, though, mostly it's a mystery to me, and I have no idea what the garden variety home user does. If 52% of users have never installed an application, what in the word do they do if/when Windows falls apart over time? I find the reformat/reinstall drill distasteful, I can't quite see it as even feasible for that 52% of current users.
Cheers, Dan. |
