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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> GNOME is a *great* platform to build desktop-ish apps *right now*.

Tech-wise strongly agree; ecosystem-wise no, because the number of users 
is too low for (non-hobbyist/volunteer) developers to care.

> That's our platform's space.  People who get scared that "Web 2.0" is
> going to replace us need to remember that the web needs a good web
> browser to run on, and that web browser needs a toolkit to be written
> in, and that toolkit is GNOME.  It's there right now and it works.
>
> All the advancements in software for end users are happening elsewhere:
> in the web, and in high-level languages.  That's fine.  That stuff also
> needs a desktop-ish foundation to be built upon, and that foundation is
> GNOME.

While I agree with most of your post, here I think you're missing an 
important point:

 - for almost everyone in the world, that foundation is _not_ GNOME.
   It's some other desktop.

 - in fact much of the recent innovation does not work on GNOME, and
   many of us don't notice since we just don't use sites like MySpace
   and Xanga, or commercial music services, or whatever, and thus don't
   experience their frequent IE/Windows-specificity

i.e. just because people use/need "a desktop" doesn't mean they use/need 
"any desktop" or specifically "our desktop."

The benefit to audience has to be *vs what they have* not *vs nothing*

The relevance of not-just-a-desktop as a direction is that it allows you 
to think about this question.

"make a desktop" alone almost by definition means failure - it defines 
the project as an existing product category that everyone already owns - 
why do they need a new one?

GNOME at least needs to say "make a desktop that _______" though for 
many cases of "that _______" the desktop aspect will be an artificial 
addition rather than an essential element of the user benefit, and thus 
very vulnerable to someone offering the same benefit minus the desktop 
requirement.

I always have to add the disclaimer that people are free to be 
disinterested in market share, mass adoption, and what have you. There 
are many other measures of success.

However, to me it's very clear that "make a desktop" has no chance of 
getting to "10x10" - this is the "safe" yet guaranteed-to-fail path.

Havoc