Re: Mummy, I made a platform in my pants! [Was: focus!]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> That said, culturally we've taken a lot of emphasis and glory away from the
> platform since pre-2.0, so it hasn't had the attention it really needs to
> improve what we can deliver on top of it. I guess the point of my post is to
> make sure we don't completely disempower/unglorify the platform in our drive
> towards coherent user focus.

Much of the 2.0 push was all about platform - GTK+ 2.0 was based on 
analyzing Qt and Swing and Windows and ensuring widget-by-widget that 
the API was competitive, for a while Red Hat was sponsoring C++ 
bindings, I did freedesktop.org, huge debates about "component systems," 
etc. This is definitely what was going on in our minds at that time, 
within Red Hat at least. I think GTK+ continues pretty strongly and 
things like freedesktop, dbus, gstreamer, etc. are coming together.

If we want to improve the platform though, why not do it using the same 
specific-benefits-for-specific-audience mindset. Only in this case the 
audience is programmers and designers.

Then we can define "enough attention" on platform - when is the platform 
good enough? When is a change important/worthwhile/correct?

I'd start by asking what qualitative/differences-in-kind would be made 
by new platform initiatives.

For example, if the platform started including assumed, guaranteed 
linkage to online services, that really changes what apps I can write.

Or if the platform, like Flash, has tools that 
nonprogrammers/visual-designers can use, then that really changes what 
apps can be written and who can write apps.

Also we have to remember the platform isn't isolated from the end user 
experience.

e.g. on this Mono thread I so rudely interrupted, it was all "small 
footprint" vs. "shiny new apps" - well, that's a tradeoff where you 
shaft either one audience who cares about one thing or another audience 
who cares about another.

It can't be resolved well except by stepping up to the level of benefits 
to audience and setting that direction first, then making platform 
decisions compatible with it.

Another example, an HTML/Flash type of platform really lets graphic 
design come into play, while a toolkit/GTK type of platform makes it 
actively painful to do original graphic design. People will have strong 
views on which is better, but either way you line up, the platform 
clearly sets the user experience on this.

A final example, introducing extra platforms to the desktop in the form 
of Firefox and OO.org complicates things substantially - but also has 
big user experience wins (or losses, depending on audience) - how do you 
decide this? You need a clear set of priorities.

> It's like the Apple comments about whether they've been successful or not. I
> think anyone who's seriously looked at their platform will know that they
> have massive silos of ammunition and opportunity in reserve - because they
> can and will be able to deliver compelling results to users faster, as will
> their developer ecosystem.

Hmm. To me the key to success in most cases won't be developing in 6 
months vs. 8, it will be whether a product is laser-focused on getting a 
benefit to its audience ASAP, and whether the product really introduces 
new benefits to an audience or not.

In the end I definitely agree with you that we need to do both, but I'll 
eat my hat[1] if the open source world suddenly really converts to the 
design focus/thinking thing and starts ignoring platform-building.

I mean seriously, this is the community that brings us hundreds of Linux 
distributions and enough programming languages to sink a small tanker.

Havoc

[1] note, I don't ever wear a hat, so this is kind of an empty offer