Re: GNOME's Target Markets

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Quim Gil wrote:
> En/na Ken VanDine ha escrit:
>
> > We shouldn't be specifically targeting
> > developers any more, we should focus on getting mainstream users.  When
> > they come the developers follow. 
>
> Well, it seems Google thinks the other way round. Many times they have
> released something new (beta) seducing first the hackers of the free
> software community, knowing that of they get excited other may come beind.
>
> Mozilla has been successful just by following the same way.
>
> What's more, even if you are Nike, Sun, Sony, Nokia, BMW or Microsoft in
> order to hit the mainstream you need a budget out of GNOME's calculations.

I agree with Quim, mostly - GNOME doesn't need "developers" so much as 
cool. And to be cool, cool people need to use your stuff. And developers 
are more cool than mainstream users in general.

Calvin Klein is (was?) cool because cool people used it. Cool made 
popular. Popular meant not cool. People moved on to Prada, Gap, or whatever.

We need momentum users - users who go out, and are proud of the stuff 
they use, tell people about it, and their blogs get read by millions of 
people who want to be a little more like them, and so they use it, and 
like it, and tell people about it, and...

All of a sudden, we're running volunteer funded full page ads in the New 
York times.

We *probably* have a bigger user base than KDE. Because GNOME comes by 
default on an awful lot of Linux. But we definitely run second in the 
momentum users stakes. Any online poll will tell you that. And getting 
the momentum users is all about being simple, surprising and cool. Being 
both simple and surprising is hard. Think of the first time you hit 
Ctrl-F in Firefox 0.7 or 0.8 and you didn't have a windo pop up. I 
remember what I said to myself - "Cool!" - and then I told a bunch of 
other people.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org