Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi Dave,

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:54:36 +0200
Dave Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:

[snip]
> 
> Firefox, by the way, was not a product of marketing. It was the
> product of the will of two people, made possible by the fact that
> it's free software. There was no market analysis, someone said "going
> on the internet has to be easier than this", and then made the web
> browser *they* wanted to use.
> 

Indeed, there was no market analysis. Usually, there is not -- this is
entrepreneurship in the sense of Schumpeter (1883 – 1950): as
an exploration of the market possibilities.

However, their idea wasn't brand new: People were complaining loudly
about the bloated Mozilla Suite back then. For example, there was a
small browser-only product before Firefox called K-Meleon, running on
Windows.

Why was Firefox such a success althought it came later as K-Meleon
IIRC? Both were open source, both had a price of zero, both were
smaller and faster then the Mozilla suite, and both were easy to
install. What was the difference? I can't produce numbers or figures
but I believe the hype generated by spreadfirefox was a major factor.

> 
> Isn't that just another way of discounting them as irrelevant?
> 

No, it's not. It just means to put things in perspective. Making it
sound otherwise was not my intention.

The large majority of people are not going to read the blogs of the
engineers for a few month when they want to buy a car; they are
studying reviews from independent journalists. And the majority of
people is not even wasting their time with studying in-depth technical
reviews when they spend 40 Euros on the next technical gagdet, be it a
DVD player or a microwave.

On the other hand, these people are not willing to read a manuel when
they simply want to install additional software on their desktop.

Remebering things like this puts statements like the ones of Doc Searls
into the right perspective.


Cheers,
Claus