On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great

["Iain *" <iaingnome gmail com>]

Stuff I've been thinking about for a while, from things people (luis,
havoc to name the two I can think of) had said, things I'd seen and
then also Kathy's talk at GUADEC, and I guess the recent what apps are
we including this time round mails have got me thinking about it some
more. This will probably be a negative mail, cos there's no answers at
the end, so don't read any further if you want a nice tidy conclusion.

Kathy's talk on passionate users, Apple's "Mac vs PC" adverts and
their success with making things cool have shown us that people don't
care about what a computer can do, but what they can do with a
computer (there may be more of a difference in my mind, I'm just
lacking a good way of explaining it). The whole idea that "Here's some
cool stuff you can do" rather than "this computer can do these 1000
features." A quick look over the "What is GNOME?"[1] and the "Why
Choose GNOME pages"[2] and ummm, yeah, I have no idea what I can do
with it at all. But I think its more than just a quick marketing job
because looking through the desktop release directory and I don't see
many programs that allow users to do anything slightly cool. There are
a few, and there are lots of really nice programs there that I use
every day, but they don't help me sit down and do something that I
want to run off and show to people. These apps have got us out of the
"suck" phase, but they won't boost us past the "woohoo" phase. So
basically what I've been thinking about is what apps will get us past
that.

I guess first we need to know who we're targetting. I get a sneaking
suspicion looking at the apple mac vs pc ads that they realised
halfway through that they were maybe portraying the mac as too much of
a fun computer and the PC was the work machine. The overall feeling I
got was "If you want to do work, get a PC", but then halfway through
the ads started namedropping MS Office as being able to run on a Mac,
maybe in an attempt to redress the balance. Maybe I'm too cynical.

I don't really know what we need to satisfy this mythical user, but
some of the things my non-computery friends use computers for would be
photo management and instant messenger.

We have Ekiga, which is cool, although I don't think we've plugged it
enough. F-Spot would be very good for filling the photo management
gap. We're lacking a good instant messenger that fits with GNOME. gaim
is alright, but lacks that 100% integration and doesn't seem to care
to get it, so I can't really suggest it. Gossip is cool, but only
really does Jabber, maybe the telepathy stuff will bring us the other
useful protocols. Fingers crossed.

But thats just off the top of my head. Doing cool music things would
be nice, we have sound-juicer, maybe Jokosher will fill a hole (its
too early to say yet). I'm sure others can think of stuff along those
lines.

Some questions that I don't have answers for:

Does GNOME have a "product" to market? How many people really get
GNOME from GNOME as opposed to the distros? Is it more the distros
place to take the software we write and put it together as a cool
package that gets marketed as "Do cool stuff" as opposed to GNOME
which we market as "Has support for 52 different languages..."

How does the knowledge that we need software X work in a free software
world where people work on whatever they feel like? We have no
managers who can say "We need an instant messenger" and put 10 people
to work on it. How does it affect our module selection process to be
looking for "Doing cool things" rather than any software that meets
the release criteria?

I'm sure I've forgotten something, and this probably turned into a
stream of thoughts rather than anything coherent. Oh well

iain