On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
Actually IMO putting all their crap in their own dir is a feature rather than a bug. I really hate the way unix apps just put their stuff all over the place so it's an incredible pain to get rid of it again.
Putting all crap in the working directory is bad design (no way to separate read-only stuff from mutable). Unix/Linux design (all over the place) is pure and simple lack of discipline, or "hack before thinking" approach. Plan 9 nearly got it right, but for the lack of persistent mounts (it's all in an rc file, executed at each login).
I think MacOS got it right: for most apps, installing just means dumping the icon wherever you want it to be, deinstalling is done by dropping it in the trash. The fact that the icon hides a directory with a bunch of different files in it is transparent to the user.
That's UI. Inside it's the same Unix crap.
I think MS's tradeoffs are mainly time to market vs even faster time to market.
It's mostly "We don't care, we don't have to, we're The Microsoft" mentality. --vadim