Subject: RE: socks ? on : off (was RE: integrating bidi (was Re: version 1.0))
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Feb 08 2001 - 18:10:52 CST
paul> My claim is that 1.0 is a very very substantial first delivery
paul> of that promise. This is not a toy. This is not a
paul> flash-in-the-pan. This isn't going away. This is real, and
paul> it's getting better every single day.
Right, but for the average person, the program to beat is MSWin9x and
WordPad. WordPad is chump-simple, but it does enough things that
people new to computers often say things like "I can't believe this
just give away a program this cool. Aren't they afraid that I won't
buy their expensive word processor?" Sooner or later, WordPad runs
out of gas, but it looks just dandy to the newbies.
AbiWord 1.0 will be somewhere above WordPad and somewhere below Word.
If you don't happen to use the couple of features that we have that
WordPad doesn't, well, it will seem to be exactly like WordPad. I
could mention features that I think some hypothetical group will think
is important but which might not be in 1.0, but that's not the point.
The point is, what are the compelling features that *are* in 1.0 that
will make AbiWord so cool and useful that someone not only uses it,
but they convince their friends to use it, they call up strangers in
the middle of the night and demand they use it, etc?
(It will also be somewhere below the word processors included in the
$75 office suites of the commercial providers who have been nuked by
Microsoft already. For some people that's big bucks, but for a lot of
people, well, you get a nice air-filled box with it and all.)
I drink that open source kool-aid you were shouting, or I wouldn't be
here. But the average church secretary probably misunderstands it as
being more like buying from the corner bodega instead of buying from
the supermarket. You and I (and reviewers) may think of open source
as a feature of a software product, but the average person does not.
Reviewers who know all about open source and all that will certainly
praise AbiWord for its potential, but I think their socks will stay
on.
There's probably no productive point to my going on about this. It
sounds kind of negative. I just think we have to look at 1.0 as a
beginning. It's a first cut at "par". A description like "blow their
socks off" is inconsistent with reality.
Your fellow shoeless cobbler...
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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