Re: the same page

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> Frankly, the market of ex-windows users (or 3d graphics and CAD users) is
> totally insignificant compared to the market of people that have never used
> a computer before.  Bearing this in mind, and the fact that the evidence
> seems to be that once someone has chosen a particular system they are
> very unlikely to change to a different one, GNOME as a project should aim
> to be that first choice.  With the reality that the wealthy parts of the
> world have made their choice, and the poor parts havent, then it seems
> obvious (to me at least :) ) where we should be going.

Which is why I make the point that Windows is not the prohibitively
expensive part of the computer. If Windows cost three times what the
hardware costs, maybe we would have a huge oppurtunity here. But unless
GNOME is a *LOT* better than it is now, we're toast, because Windows95
is a more usable system than GNOME right now. We shouldn't slow down our
growth in features to match slower markets yet because we simply aren't
to a point where people can use GNOME. Esp. people in areas that haven't
used computers.

Also, I think poorer parts of the world (a place I lived for a decade)
tend to get hardware that is either insanely old or fairly new (say,
only a couple years behind the curve). I don't really know why this is,
but I have observed it time and again. We can't target GNOME to run on
the MacIIe ;-) I also believe that the 3rd world will have a tendency to
follow what is standard in the US and Europe today.

Tangentially, I don't think most people in the world *are* about to get
access to a computer, or would really care if they did. Because
computers simply don't deal with needs that are remotely connected to
their realities. So its not like this is some big revolution that's
about to happen. It will be a process of slow adoption coupled to the
very slow economic growth of many of these areas. You can drop donated
hardware into a village and even train some people to use it and to
teach kids in school... but it doesn't make a difference. Its an
interesting toy, and then they finally leave school and go fishing
(which is what really matters, since eating and perhaps selling some so
you can buy things in the market is a lot more pertinent than this relic
of the 1st-world office) and never bother with a computer again.

As a general trend the 3rd world doesn't *want* to do anything different
from the 1st world, so as soon as Microsoft decides they want the
market, they will probably have it.

> > 
> > The reason that I believe focusing on being the low budget alternative
> > is the wrong approach is that you're setting yourself up to be destroyed
> > by a natural tendency. Hardware is, on average, getting faster than
> > slower. Those 2nd hand cast-offs the Nepalese village gets in two or
> > three years will be a lot faster than the machines they got today. If
> > we're not growing and expanding to use that power they will look at
> > GNOME and say "wow, that's primitive compared to FoobarOS 2004". 
> 
> I don't think the hardware upgrade rate is going to be that fast.  There
> are many times more people without computers than with, so if the agencies
> distributing these cast offs do their jobs right then the donations will be
> spread thinly rather than upgraded often.
> 
> And note than I am emphatically _not_ saying that we shouldnt exploit new
> hardware power.  What I _am_ saying is that we shouldn't insist on it, but
> that we should just use it if available.

That's really really hard. If you buy that its the layers of abstraction
that are causing a lot of the problem, it doesn't matter too much if you
are using a non-roman alphabet or not, you're still going to be paying
(at least some) for pango.

-Seth

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