On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Will Stephenson<wstephenson@suse.de> wrote:
I think we can make the message "we recognise and respond to what our users want". We're not hiding GNOME as is the case with KDE on SLED nor are we reducing Novell's investment in it.
Our users want us to check the radio button, or our users want us to make a "marketing statement" that KDE is the preferred desktop? Or, is it beyond that? Our users want us to focus more on KDE? That's the sentiment that I seem to be getting so far that underlies the feature. Not trying to put words in your mouth here - just saying that what I see in the discussions on openFATE, on my blog, and in this list, the real "ask" is this: "SUSE used to be KDE-centric. I miss this. I want the old SUSE. I want a distro that is KDE-centric that I can use to promote KDE." Nothing wrong with that -- but I don't think this feature gets us there. It may be what many people think is the first step on the road to getting there, but it doesn't get us there, and I don't see a plan to get us there beyond this first step. I see a lot of speculation that *if* we make this choice, we *may* gain users and contributors on the KDE side and we *probably will lose users and contributors for GNOME and will have trouble attracting new GNOME users and contributors.
I'm not a marketeer, but I am married to one. And I've heard from a couple of places that good marketing orthodoxy is to focus on your biggest market and give them what they want, and look for untapped markets.
Really this gets back to the thing that comes up over and over again -- we haven't decided what markets we want to focus on. So we have two different things there: * The KDE community, some of which already prefer openSUSE, some don't -- but I think we can all agree that this is smaller than the second choice: * The untapped market -- i.e., Windows and Mac users. If openSUSE had *all of the existing KDE users in the world, we still wouldn't approach 2% of the untapped market. Choosing this feature alone won't do a lot to address the untapped market. There are ways we could address the "untapped market" with KDE, but I haven't seen that, so far I just see: * Make KDE the default * Stuff happens * World domination, yay! (Yes, I'm being a bit sarcastic. It's Friday and it's been a long week. But truly - I think we're speculating heavily here.) Best, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier <jzb@zonker.net> openSUSE Community Manager: http://zonker.opensuse.org Blogs: http://blogs.zdnet.com/community | http://www.dissociatedpress.net Twitter: jzb | Identica: jzb http://identi.ca/group/opensuse/members -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org