Re: What is GNOME office?

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

> Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com> writes: 
> > I suggest everyoune to try to distinguish between 2 goals:
> > 1) We want 'politically' conquer world desktops
> > 2) We want to produce techincally best desktop in world
> > Current state of things seems to suggest, that they do not fit well
> > together. Techincal excellence just involves too much code rewrite and too
> > slow progress to compete with inferior products. And becoming the dominant
> > desktop creates huge backward-compatibility intertia.
> > 
> 
> I don't agree - I think Microsoft and Apple technologies are extremely
> high quality in general, in many, many ways ahead of us. Beating them
> will involve making our technology at least as good as theirs, if not
> compellingly better. So I think 2) is an essential step in 1). You
> can't win on marketing alone. People are using free software because
> it meets their needs.

Hmmm...
I personally would consider those to be a huge pile of mud, containing
some diamonds. But I have not seen the actual code...
Anyways, think about:
Windows/DOS vs. MacOS
Windows/DOS/MacOS vs. Amiga
Windows/DOS/MacOS vs. Unix
...

So I have strong feeling that better techincal solution does not win
in short-term. Just do not mix end-user experience (which is great for
WinMac) with techincal features (which are endless source of joy (or
frustration) to people writing code).

> For me in the technical evaluation we need to be thinking of how we'll
> have a competitive office suite 2, 3 years down the road; that's the
> kind of timeframe that I'd see as realistic. Remember that Netscape
> ended up wasting a year trying to develop a bad codebase, then dumped
> it and ended up taking 2 more years to write Mozilla, for a total of 3
> years on a web browser. I see no reason to expect the office suite
> process to be shorter.

This sounds more political than techincal need to me...
Political: We need good office suite to get more end-users and grow
  our project presence
Techincal: I know The Right Way (TM) how a word processor should
  handle things both internally and externally, so I go with implementing
  it, regardless how much time it will take.

Surely the foundation has to keep reasonable balance between political
and techincal issues. But I also have strong feeling, that many gnome
hackers are not well prepared to preserve clear mind in dealing with
active corporate lobby - otherwise I cannot understand, why the OO
and other similar issues are up at all.

Lauris