The obvious remedy would be and EXTREMELY detailed official XP-to-ubuntu transition site where almost any feature in XP can be looked up -- and the Ubuntu equivalent is presented. There are some such sites around (http://www.osalt.com/ is a good example when it comes to software) but I haven't seen one that is comprehensive and simple enough for the imagined target audience.
-Nod5
You know, this comment by
Nod5 left me thinking. Because it reminded me of what Microsoft itself did when faced with a similar situation, i.e. being the "underdog" in a popular software category. And I'm not talking about the browsers war with Netscape, but the fight against WordPerfect for the supremacy in the word processing category. Do you remember how Microsoft included in every single version of Word a special "Help for Wordperfect users" to ease the transition from WordPerfect? I can't recall which was the first version of Microsoft Word to include that but I'm pretty sure that back then WordPerfect was the dominant program for word processing. And they still have it in Word 2003 (I'm not running Word 2007, so maybe someone else can confirm if it's still there in that version). I'm not saying that that was the sole determinant in Microsoft success in placing Word as the #1 program in the category, but it sure must have helped.
So, what would happen if, say, Ubuntu started including a special "Help for Windows users" as part of the standard help files of the OS? I confess my utmost ignorance about Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular, so maybe this is already there, but I highly doubt it. Such a move would be probably denounced as "sacrilege" by some members of the community, but I think it'd be a wise move on their part since I guess that most first time users of Ubuntu come from Windows rather than another Linux distribution or Mac.