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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Applications categories
From:       Jaroslaw Staniek <staniek () kde ! org>
Date:       2009-02-27 18:04:41
Message-ID: 56a746380902271004t361c9766u84a14c7bdd8c465a () mail ! gmail ! com
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2009/2/27 Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>:
> On Thursday 26. February 2009 17:39:06 Cyrille Berger wrote:
>> As you know the oxygen team is currently working on the icons for KOffice
>> 2.0 applications, our logos are descritely used in those icons, since we
>> used four colors for each of the category, this raised, on IRC, the
>> question on the categories, and which apps belongs to which category.
> []
>> But, it was noted that having almost all applications in one category was a
>> bit silly, and defeat the point on having categories, so it was also
>> suggested that "Productivity Applications" would be restricted to the
>> "classical" three core office suite applications.
>
> As a basis I think it makes sense to consider the goals of categories.
> As far as I am concerned the categories are there to address different target
> groups.  It will show up in presentation graphs and we can take one category
> and promote it on its own merit.
> So, for explaining things to newcomers, the category of "productivity
> applications" is a nice grouping word that people consider the core office.
> We could say that gnome office is equal to the KOffice set of productivity
> applications.
>
>> Which lead to those categories:
>> Productivity Applications: kword, kspread, kpresenter
>> Creativity Applications: karbon14, krita
>> Management Applications: kplato, kexi, kivio
>> Supporting Applications: kchart, kformula
>
> I think this is a very sane categorization.
> We have 'productivity' which is what everyone in the world agrees is the core
> of the office suite.
> We have "Creativity" which is what the karbon+krita devs want to market
> themselves as. (optionally without even noting its a part of KOffice)
> We have the "supporting applications" that are really in the list just because
> the specification wants it, but most people don't ever start those apps
> separately.
> The other set of applications are apps that are good at very specific stuff,
> quite specialized, really. This shows by the fact that KPlato and Kexi both
> have very little Flake integration. Kexi still has near zero KOffice
> integration.

It's probably a technological properties of these projects, I believe
their existence should have nothing to do with the message, which, in
turn, should be rather simple, not scientific or looking too complex.

Couldn't the KDE Marketing Working Group have its word here?

> So instead of giving each their specialized category; it makes more sense to
> join them into one and come up with a nice label for them.

I wonder that You sound like software developer here, Thomas :)
Let's look that there are multiple labels/properties possible to
assign to each application. I think we could compare to leading
software packages and learn from the successful marketing (even if
it's not the best technology).

A simple proposal for a those interested in the topic, is to look how
much _task-oriented_, _real use-case-driven_ are Office Suite
Overviews published e.g. at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/suites/HA101656501033.aspx for MS
Office. Apple's web site gives equally well prepared examples, I
think.

OTOH I've never heard of the aforementioned beast called Gnome Office,
in the real world, really, so cannot understand the need for this kind
of comparison. G.O. is a 'virtual' package that can be compared to
KDEPIM+KOffice+Gvenview.

>> But the name of the third category, "Management Applications" is now
>> questioned.
>
> I can see their arguments. I'm personally not that concerned about the name,
> whatever it turns out to be. "Management" doesn't have an immediate
> association with project management in my mind.

It is very subjective, depending if you look at education or business
users, etc. Members of the latter group could be rather confused.
Sometimes I have enough of work in explaining to people, including
those in this thread, that Kexi is not a management tool, at least no
more than KSpread.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
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