Re: redifining GNOME office.

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 23:30 +0300, Quim Gil wrote:
> On 4/4/07, Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com> wrote:
> > we would lose an important constituency (those making purchasing
> > decisions, etc.)
> 
> Those making purchasing decisions don't look at GNOME alone, look at
> distributions. They think in Firefox, they think in
> Evolution/Thunderbird, they think in OpenOffice, they care to have
> well covered the PDF, Flash, Java issues... and they don't really care
> if application X is in fact GNOME or not as far it works properly.
> 
> IMveryHO trying to marketing-wise (re)build a concept of GNOME Office
> to compete against OOo is even more futile than putting energies into
> beating Firefox's success with Epiphany.

Sure, but I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not trying to sell the
concept of GNOME Office over OOo, because I agree, I don't think that
would work. For those who really care about productivity apps on the
free desktop, OOo is the most important app (IMveryHO also ;)

What I'm saying is that "GNOME Office" needs to be about saying to these
people, "GNOME is the best environment for running your
OpenOffice/Tbird/whatever". It's not about promoting GNOME ahead of
those apps, but promoting the idea of GNOME being the best environment
for those apps.

At the end of the day, people will choose GNOME for a very few reasons,
but primarily I think their reasons will be based on the apps they want
to run, not because they like the look of the desktop. We should be
making their apps work better in GNOME, and telling them that if they
want the best OOo/whatever experience, that GNOME is the desktop to run.

Cheers,

Alex.