"Eric S. Raymond" wrote:

[ ... ]

> > By desktop battle, I take it you are referring to the competition
> > between KDE and the likes of GNOME, Microsoft, and Apple?  Other than
> > what you've mentioned, what kind of strategy do you propose for KDE
> > winning the desktop battle?
> 
> Pay attention to users.  End users.  *Real* users.

Hiya,

All users are "real".  I suppose what you mean to say is, focus on the
proper market segment, and that segment is not developers.  Point taken,
but that still leaves a lot of market segments that have incompatible
desires.  For instance, there are the enterprise, goverment,
school/university, small business, and home segments.  Each of these,
particularly the enterprise, small business, and home segments, can be
broken down into many more market segments.  For example, for the home
market you could have a webpad, a TiVO-like-device, a full desktop, a
PDA, etc.  Not only is it difficult to determine what is most important
for each market - KDE is not like MS:  we don't have thousands of sales
managers running around pushing product and relaying feedback to a host
of paid programmers who do as they are told - but each market also has
contradictory needs - e.g. a PDA user is more concerned about screen
estate, memory and bandwidth than an enterprise would be.

In short, there is no developer who possibly *can* or *desires* to
satisfy users of all those markets.  It's going to require patches from
businesses that service those markets or from those in those markets,
since they know what they need and have a real interest in obtaining
it.  When the Linux kernel got journalling file systems, b/c some market
segments needed those, did people badger Linus to write those?  No, of
course not, but the businesses who had the expertise and desire
contributed the (rather large) patches needed to implement journaling. 
Same with a great many important enhancements to the kernel, to GNU
software, or any other Open Source project.  In other words, it's going
to require that KDE continue to be a Bazaar :-).

The marketing effort, IMHO, should be to get those contributions from
new contributors, rather than to criticize those already working hard on
the project to do even more (and more precisely, really, to ask them to
do something which they cannot possibly do, such as follow the unknown
directives of something too abstrace and contracdictory - "real
users").  This marketing effort is what I am focusing on, and I think in
the near future we will hopefully see some real progress in this area.

[ ... ]

Ciao,

Dre
 
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