Subject: Re: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: Eric W. Sink (eric@abisource.com)
Date: Wed May 02 2001 - 18:35:28 CDT
> Our luxury (bane?) is that we get to choose what goes into our 1.0
release,
> more-or-less.
I'm glad we agree, mostly. The only pushback I will offer, to you and
to others here, is this: Believing that the dynamics of your team are
different from a "corporate" team is an illusion. Lots of corporate
teams also get to choose their feature set.
Granted, some teams are composed of drones with project managers who
make all the decisions. Even in those cases, you are "project manager"
level people. Picking on Sam for a moment: Sam will eventually
graduate
and look for a job. Sam's resume darn well better have AbiWord on it,
and it better be done in AbiWord. Nobody is going to look at his
resume and say, "Geez, what a great coder. We can stick this guy in
a room and never listen to his opinions, and just watch lines of C++
flow out onto the Ethernet." Sure, Sam is a coder. But the real issue
is that if you've worked seriously on AbiWord, you are geared to be
*more* than a coder.
In other words, yes, you have to make tough feature decisions, and
yes, people in the world of business do too.
> > 2. Right now you have no users at all, at least none that
> > are Normal People. (If you are reading this note, there
> > is virtually no chance at all that you are normal.)
> > Unhappy users are better than no users.
>
> While I've agreed with your comments thus far, I don't agree with this
one
> at all. We're shipped with every linux distribution. We're shipped by
> Ximian. We go out on QNX cds. We are like #1 download on the Be sites.
We're
> #2 or so on Sourceforge downloads. And certainly not all of those
downloads
> are coming from people on this list :-)
I don't intend to denigrate the usability of AbiWord you have achieved,
nor do I want to make light of the fact that many people have chosen
to become users of AbiWord. However, very few of those users are
Normal.
I'm sure the number of Normal People using AbiWord is non-zero, but it
is so low that it rounds down to zero on any interesting graph. Anyone
who uses Ximian, Linux, QNX or BeOS is almost certainly not Normal,
with the obvious exception of folks who use QNX and don't know it. ;-)
Even if you count these people as Normal, which is ludicrous, your
target user base is four, perhaps five orders of magnitude larger
than any actual user base you have now.
Bottom line: It's fun to be appreciative of the users you've got now.
Try to reserve your real excitement for the people that AbiWord was
designed for. Don't forget about the church secretary.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:00 CDT