Re: Sorry State [Was: NLD10 and GNOME]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 21:54 +0100, Jon K Hellan wrote:
> However, if we decide to target a niche audience, on a niche operating
> system, that's niche squared. I doubt if that's sustainable.
> 
Didn't say niche, I said specific. The group can still be large. There
are many, many well-defined subsets of the world's billions of people
that still contain a hell of a lot of people.

And the whole point here is to remove the nicheness of the software
(whether it's an OS, I don't know), by appealing strongly to a specific
group that wants to use it.

Would you expect a sports car with a truck bed to appeal to more people
than a regular truck or regular sports car? I would not.

Not choosing an audience doesn't mean you appeal to everyone. It means
you appeal to everyone in some ways *and* make everyone hate you in some
ways, so nobody really likes you overall. What you want to do is be sure
some group of people likes you in *almost all important respects*.

The fallacy is to think that indecisiveness avoids the decision and
leads to universal appeal. It does not. It leads to either a de facto
decision (best case), or a totally incoherent piece of software (worst
case).

Sure, the trick is in picking a group that's specific enough but not too
niche, and in trying to appeal to multiple "similar enough" groups,
while not breaking your appeal by chasing overly-dissimilar groups. But
life is full of judgment calls, no?

Havoc