The problem for this use case is that certain businesses, like medical offices, use specialized software that is often Windows only.
I am not a fan. It’s a big outage waiting to happen. It’s an enormous data breach waiting to happen. It will inevitable be enshitified.
If the government had already thought about this in advanced (even in 2013 when doctolib was just starting out), then there could be very strong protectiosn for data which would then allay all of these concerns, and we might have had multiple players in this space.
The best use of Doctolib for me is that I can make appointments without having to speak perfect German on phone. I can make appointments in evening when I'm back from office and can relax a little bit. So, doctolib is a godsend for me as an immigrant here. and I'm guessing for a lot of people too. I can look up doctors who are available without having to bother the receptionist. This is much more efficient way of doing things.
What's more, this is a sensitive and regulated field, where trust is essential. They can't afford to mess around if they don't want to quickly find themselves subject to moe restrictive regulations.
They were heavily criticised in France because they allowed charlatans and people with no medical training to register (particularly for Botox injections). As soon as this became known, they quickly rectified the situation.
Seriously. That's the reason that fax is still popular in the medical industry.
1. You get way less faxes than emails.
2. Faxes can't steal credentials.
3. You should be auditing expenses anyway.
What's more, it's Google, so we're not safe from a ‘Lol, we're discontinuing support for Chrome OS. Good luck, Byeeee.’.
Some offices still have bad memories of Google Cloud Print, for example. I'm not saying that being an early adopter of a distribution that's less than a year old is a good solution. Just that Google's business products don't have a very good reputation.
ChromeOS Flex exists, it is free of charge, and it runs on more or less any x86-64 computer, including Intel Macs.
Nordic Choice got hit with ransomeware and rather than paying, just reformatted most of its client PCs with ChromeOS Flex and kept going with cloud services.
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/nordic...
Sure it's less popular. It came in under 20 years ago, competing against an entrenched superpower that was already nearly 30 years old back then. It's done pretty well.
The Google Apps for Business bundle has outsold by far ever single FOSS email/groupware stack in existence, and every other commercial rival as well.
Notes is all but dead. Groupwise is dead. OpenXChange is as good as dead. HP killed OpenMail.
That's ridiculous.
Their office buys their stuff from a supplier which ships them a Windows box with all the batteries included.
That's why doctors in my country still prefer legacy physical pen and paperwork, versus interactions with the modern digitized equivalents which are universally hated because they're not designed by doctors but by some consultancy who won the government tender.
Adding dealing with an unfamiliar OS and Wine on top of that is not the slam dunk you think it is.
The average user doesn't want (and shouldn't need) to understand technical stuff like file formats (JPEG vs. PNG), the data load of video streaming, what a "driver" is, etc. Forcing them to grapple with these concepts is a fundamental design failure, but I think it’s a difficult pill to swallow for nerds to accept that others just don’t care about these things.
This is why companies like Apple have been so successful: they don't just simplify the interface, they abstract away the complex, technical reality into a language and experience that feels intuitive and friendly for the users.
[EDIT] The core problem, in case the example didn't make it clear, is that these things interrupt a workflow they use often, and are accustomed to having always work the same way, and do so in service, usually, of showing them a bunch of stuff they don't give a fuck about and didn't really need to know. Even the ones that block interaction to highlight new features are really bad—OK, that's nice, but I'm trying to do the thing I always do with this and you're getting in my way, making my program temporarily behave and look weird and confusing, et c.
She has no conceptual understanding of what’s an app and a webpage and why they’re treated differently, she just kinda accepted she uses something called Firefox to do a search and some icon in the phone that has the exact name of the other app she wants to use. She never understood (or cared) what it means to “close” an app if she already does that when she presses home or back, no matter how much I try to explain.
When you think about it, it’s all very confusing for them, and since people making these things already understand them well, they make stuff assuming the users will understand the whole thing as well as they themselves do.
No other buttons (visible on the face, anyway) to confuse it for. It's right in comfortable reach of the thumb. "Which button do I push again? Oh right, there's only one."
(I also think going to "swipe up to unlock" instead of the brilliant slider they had before was a big mistake, as far as reducing the level of comfort for the median user)
But your POS system where you enter in orders? That's Linux. And guess what - it just works, it chugs along and does its thing.
There's no reason that doctors offices couldn't use software that utilizes Linux. And to pretend that windows is low maintenance? Tsk tsk, windows is a time bomb.
It is possible for somebody to make this into a workable bundle targeting specific professions/environments. A doctor would not care if double clicking X icon open an app through wine or not.