Re: What is GNOME office?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Andy Tai <atai ece ucsd edu> writes: 
> 1. KDE has an office suite today, GNOME does not have
> a complete one. And GNOME needs one, fast.
>

I think this is false. Last I did a thorough investigation (which was
some months ago), GNOME Office was well ahead of KOffice in many
areas, most importantly it had code being written at two times the
average rate of KOffice (14% growth per month vs. 7%, I think it was)
and contained substantially more code. KWord/KPresenter were ahead of
the GNOME pieces, Gnumeric/Guppi are ahead of KSpread/KChart by miles.

But, regardless of that, I think the "KDE has an office suite today"
thing is BS, and so is "GNOME has an office suite today." Both are 5%
of MS Office. We're talking 4% of the way there vs. 5% of the way
there. At that point, it's hard to care about GNOME vs. KDE.

Let's remember who the real competitor is. Proprietary software. We
should measure everything we do against the current 99% market share
holder. Our strategy should be focused on beating them. Anything else
is just wishful thinking that won't get us where we want to go.

That's why we should simply cooperate with KDE, get along with them,
and be nice. Because beating them should not be our goal; that goal is
not interesting. It's quibbling over a 1% slice of the pie. The goal
is to beat proprietary desktops. If we reduce the proprietary desktop
marketshare by only 5% more, we will have gained far more than we
would by fighting with KDE over our current 1% slice.

Even if you're worried about KDE: assume that GNOME and KDE each have
0.5% of current desktop marketshare, then if we get 1% more of total
desktop marketshare, we'll have triple the KDE userbase. So the best
strategy for "winning" vs. KDE is to ignore KDE and focus on beating
Microsoft. The only way KDE could "win" there is to also pound away at
Microsoft. And personally I consider it a good problem to have if both
GNOME and KDE are grabbing lots of proprietary marketshare. I won't be
upset about that at all.
  
> 6. KDE is there adding pressure.  GNOME has no time to
> waste and needs to move fast (repeat of the first one)
> 

Don't agree. Infighting over the 1% slice of marketshare is just dogs
fighting over scraps. Let's go for the big goals.

Havoc