Instaling to the Desktop (Let's Start a Riot)

I am intentionally announcing a decision that might make experience X-Plane users unhappy - my goal here is to solicit arguments against it (if there are any) since it's a sort of a strange change.

The proposal is to make the default installation location for a new copy of X-Plane be...the desktop.

EDIT: to clarify some of the blog comments, this is a default installation location; the user will be able to customize both the folder name that is created to contain X-Plane (default will be "X-Plane 9") and the folder into which this new X-Plane 9 folder will be placed.

The desktop? What are you hacks thinking? Well, here's what we're thinking:

1. Our goal is to minimize tech support calls during installation. This means making an installer where the last computer-savvy users will not get stuck in the installation process. If you know what you're doing, you're not who we're aiming at. (I reiterate, we get a lot of calls about installation problems from users who have never used a computer before.)
   
2. We need a location that the user installing X-Plane has access to, guaranteed. That rules out places like the Applications folder on OS X - we expect the least sophisticated users to not customize the install location, so we need one that will work.
3. We need a location that the user can find. This rules out their home folder (the user may not use their home folder or know it exists) as well as the C drive and the Program Files folder on Windows (both can have their files hidden by default on Windows XP to keep users from breaking tings).

The desktop solves all of these problems. Every user has write-access to his or her own desktop, and every user knows where it is.

If, like me, you don't want X-Plane on your desktop, you can simply click the "destination" button in the installer to put it somewhere else.

As a final note, the strongest alternative to this on Windows was to put the app in program files and build a start menu short-cut. But this starts the sweater unraveling...if we have a shortcut, we need an uninstaller rather than trashing the folder...if we have an uninstaller, how do we cope with multiple installs...by the time you solve these problems you have a huge amount of new untested code.

I'd like to get a more Windows and Mac interface compliant installer, and we'll get there eventually, but the work I'm doing now is aimed at the biggest real problems we face:

• Users not knowing where X-Plane is.
• Errors during the install in its default configuration.
• Problems installing and configuring scenery.
  

Okay, there it is, fire away!