Re: Focusing on innovation re: mono, python et al

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> I thought we were targeting a desktop platform for ISV to integrate it?
>   In that case it make sense to provide modules.
>
> BTW what about providing the Office suite first? Because Gnome
> penetration is first into large "business" [1] deployment, and and
> Office suite is more likely to hit that target. We still don't, but
> distribution vendors do.

I'd advocate being more specific than this. According to Federico's 
stuff, which also agrees with my observations, the success is when:
 - thin client / fixed function works
 - low cost is important (government / edu)

> [1] business  as in opposition to home market: cities, universities,
> whatever were people do *productive* work and not hobby/entertainment,
> which is essentially e-mail, web-based, office (word processing,
> spreadsheets), etc.

But business as in large companies with a lot of money and people doing 
office productivity, there's not much success. Some reasons for that:
 - the cost of the Windows/Office license simply is not a big deal
 - thin client has no value when laptops are involved, and laptops
   are almost always involved
 - these companies have hundreds of existing apps
 - these companies have bothered to set up all the active directory
   and other windows management stuff and have it working
 - users are heavily invested in MS Office, Outlook, and similar and
   the IT department is not going to be able to win a political battle
   to disrupt all that

So this is a different thing entirely from the thin client / 
government-edu deployments.

Small business, medium business, and I might guess businesses outside 
the US are all yet more different cases.

When talking about target audience, it should be a lot more specific 
than "home" vs. "business" in other words.

The specifics here heavily affect decisions. For example, would we want 
a word processor more like Pages or more like Word. Or do we need to 
care about a word processor at all. Or a desktop at all.

Havoc