Re: reflections on LJ's reader's choice awards

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

Seth - you made a good and helpful posting I think.

On the subject of Mandrake, it'd be worth looking at some of the
tools included (e.g. drakmenu, drakfont) and at their patches that
end up with kde and gnome sharing menus.

On office suites, the real business objective usually (I think) isn't
that it's a "suite", it's that the programs can be integrated with
other "mission critical apps" as they say, e.g. you can use visual
basic to connect MS Word or Excel (a spreadsheet) to a database, 
or add a button to Powerpoint (a presentation tool) to send the
current presentation to someone over Lotus Notes.

This flexibility comes at a price -- virus infections -- but the
perceived need for integration within a business is so strong that
Microsoft applications are still very dominant.

As for getting gnome 2.0 used by applications, and eventually by
distributions, I think that's a question of documentation as much as
anything else, although tools like kdevelop also make a difference.

E.g. make sure that the gtk+ API reference has a *picture* of every
widget or control in use -- don't assume someone can guess what a
clist or ctree is from a short textual description.  Include sample
applications on the web: not everyone can use CVS, e.g. because of
a corporate firewall.

On Mandrake at least, probably most people use a mixture of Gnome
and KDE programs.  That's helped by the common menus, of course, and
the way Mandrake sets up the sound support.  Could KDE and Gnome share
a common object request broker too?  The easier it is for a user to
switch desktops, the easier it is for distribution to include both.
And they'll need to add their extra menu items and desktop icons to
both.

"Marketing" is something that takes a lot of work.

Best,

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Core staff contact, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001