Am Sonntag, 7. Dezember 2008 16:50:50 schrieb Tony Alfrey:
That said, when my customers come to me and scream that their hardware does not work like they want it to, that they want round knobs instead of square knobs, that they want blue lights instead of green lights, I do not try to "educate" them, I do not insult them, I do not tell them to go file a bug report and then label it as "Invalid", but I go back to my marketing crew to find out if the feelings are universal, and if so, then I go back to the drawing table and give my customers round knobs and blue lights.
Now I understand that this is an "Open Source" community, and that there is "choice" and developers like to "innovate" and all of that stuff. But in the long run, I cannot go into my grocery store and trade all of that for a loaf of bread: I need to sell something to trade cash for bread. So if SuSE wants to sell something, it might be helpful to "hear" their customers.
Indeed, although "hearing" is not that easy if you want to get the statistics right. And of course there is the chance that your target-market changes. I'm sure Novell will pay developers to fork KDE3 or do whatever, if they see a business, i.e. customers. And even outside Novell I am sure that there will be KDE3 distros, if somebody sees "customers" for it. In fact Novell and especially the KDE team listened to their "customers" already and hence backported stuff to KDE 4.1. So it is not the way that kde- devs do not listen, it's just that they differentiate between noise and the "universal"-bits as you call them. Sven -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org