Re: WGO : GNOME Software Map

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi!

On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 16:10:03 +0200
Gergely Nagy <greg gnome hu> wrote:

[snip]

> What's the policy on hiding appnames? For Average Joe it's not
> trivial to find out that the file manager is nautilus or the movie
> player is totem...
> 

[snip]

Here's what I believe is the major mistake in the discussion: Everybody
seems to assume that an ordinary user is interested in reading all this
stuff on our main page.

An ordinary user has better things to do to surf to GNOME's homepage.
If they do, they will probably spend, well, maybe a minute or two on
the page and that's probably an overestimation.

Speaking in the lingo of marketing science: You assume a
high-involvement consumer [1] which is probably wrong.

This is basically the same mistage that the UNIX guys do when they
assume that people read manuals!

Even the minority of guys and gals who are interested in this somehow,
don't mind some pages sorted under wgo -- there's no advantage using
some strange wgo/apps/app/ pages when gnomefiles.org lists them all,
without the politics, but including the opportunity to exchange comments
with other users.

There is no need for another software map, anymore.

All we need are some homepages for GNOME's projects so each one can
offer a complete collection of relevant material or links for the
minority who *really* needs some more information. This is why
projects.gnome.org/* makes sense -- we get it out of the way of the wgo
revamp, and can help each projects piece by piece when there's time and
sufficient resources. Meanwhile, they can continue doing whatever they
do with their homepages anyway. And we can link to these pages from wgo
if we *really* need (but with the exception of some showcase projects
we don't need that anyway.)

Referencing what Apple does is useless. Just because Apple offers
these pages, who says their pages are used by any relevant amount of
visitors?

What we really should look at for reference is download.com -- when one
count the number of applications in the sub-categories, one gets over
14.000 desktop applications! 14.000!

And (nearly) all of them are easy to install.

Even gnomefiles.org is miles away from download.com and this is our
major marketing problem.

To summerize: People interested in a software map will probably use
gnomefiles and/or kde-apps because these provide better overview. Those
who are not interested (yet) in getting information about more apps are
unlikely to visit wgo for getting detailed information that GNOME
includes Evolution or other -- from their point of view: strange
-- stuff. They are satiesfied when we tell them that GNOME offers a
default E-Mail client.

The tour would be absolutely sufficient for them but the tour is still
in CVS, only. This is what we should be concerned about.

Just my 2cents.

Cheers,
Claus

[1] http://www.marketingpower.com/mg-dictionary-view1762.php