Subject: Re: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Wed May 02 2001 - 19:23:23 CDT
On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 06:35:28PM -0500, Eric W. Sink wrote:
>
> > 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.
Just to emphasize the data point, Sam is looking for a summer job, Sam
has AbiWord at the top of his resume, and my resume is sure as hell in
AbiWord.
> 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.
The latter part of that statement is true. But I would estimate that
more than half of our users are on Windows. And at least some of them
are definitely Normal.
sam th --- sam@uchicago.edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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