[no subject]

"It's been pointed out that Apple is now, or will soon be the world's
largest vendor of Unix systems. Creating a user-friendly Unix has been
something of a holy grail for decades, and is of course the goal of many
Linux developers. The fact that Apple (and, to a lesser extent, Be)
succeeded in providing the power of Unix to those who want it while not
requiring the average user ever to think about it is an example of what
I was saying earlier -- that good user experiences don't tend to flow
easily from the open source development model."
"Creating a good user experience requires that everyone working on a
project be on the same page -- something that is decidedly not the case
in the open source community. I made this point again and again through
the years I was writing about BeOS, and the new Apple experience
underlines its truth. Be and Apple have been able to create good user
experiences alongside the Unix shell with far fewer developers and years
than the open source community has put into the various X11 window
managers."

I think we should be talking about what direction we want GNOME to be
heading and what things we want it to be able to do. It would be
valuable for us to be communicating with eachother about how we see
GNOME moving and what we want done with GNOME. 

For example... I was recently talking with Telsa and Jeff Waugh, both of
whom felt it was really important for GNOME to run on older
pentium-class machines because that is a market that has been largely
abandoned by Microsoft and hence an opportunity. They also care about
various "people" in that class of users (such as non-profits). All else
being equal I would love for this to be true too, but given a choice
between a desktop that was a) more usable or b) had more useful features
and a system that ran on older machines I would choose the first two
over the third. Maybe the conflict isn't inherent, but its an example of
the subtle ways we are on "different pages".

There's value in different people having different interests (and hence
contribute different persectives and skills so there is balance) but its
important to work things out so the system feels coherent and isn't
"luke-warm at everything".

Within the usability project we have talked about creating "stories
about GNOME"...sort of a series of experiences we would like users to
have and then work out how GNOME needs to change to accomodate those. If
anyone is interested in this (particularly developers who have made
significant contributions, since your visions about GNOME have the most
effect) we can set something up and actually get several of these
scenarios done. 

Maybe this general topic is something we could also talk about at
GUADEC; it would benefit a lot from face-to-face interaction.

-Seth

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