Re: GNOME 3 Marketing - GNOME Shell

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Diego Escalante Urrelo <diegoe gnome org> wrote:

El mar, 30-03-2010 a las 11:52 -0400, Owen Taylor escribió:

>
> We can also point to various alternative desktops built on GNOME
> technology - whether that's the continuing ability to run the GNOME 2
> panel and window manager, or to XFCE and LXDE.
>

Scratch that, we either point people to GNOME Shell or GNOME Panel +
Metacity. Our message is totally broken if we point people to other
products :-).

Exactly.  We don't really want to give up a particular market segment to someone else.  The piece of the pie is already small.  I can understand that perhaps you want to point people who still have 486 or pentiums 1-3 out there.  But we should still be able to be viable with a Pentium4 class (or equivalent AMD machine) otherwise we might lose market share in the less technically advanced countries who do not yet have widespread proliferation of the latest hardware.  This is especially important as when they finally do get up to speed we want them to continue to use GNOME as their primary desktop.

I apologize if regression is not a good term.  What I meant is that there are differences that people are used to that will require retraining to do the same things.  There are a host of applets/features and what not that people are used or have become popular enough that they will demand them.  Not having it means that gnome-shell adoption will either be very slow or they will look for alternatives to have the same thing.  It is possible of course that if said feature is implemented that people might re-adopt but of course depends on the strength of the gnome 3 experience.  Everyone loves a winner and if there is perception of a winner then they'll come back.  But it is of course a risk. :)

sri