Re: OT: 'usability' hype

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Re: OT: 'usability' hype
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday 28/Feb/2006, @21:22

Aaron,

> but what really astounds me to no end is how a product that isn't even released yet (MS vista) has people declaring the "war"

War is not over, but we need *money* to make the last push. Writing software is fun and all (I love it), but maintaining and squeezing out the last bugs isn't. It needs money no matter if we're talking about kernel, KDE or GNOME. It's kinda funny that KDE would need least of it, yet it's hardly getting any :/

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Re: OT: 'usability' hype
by Manik Chand on Tuesday 28/Feb/2006, @23:03

We have a couple of betas of Vista. It looks more of a slow shell. All the razzle and dazzle is superficial and probably much work-underneth is being finished currently.
It is well known that Win has a lot of crap under the polished shell and they would need much time to clean that up.
KDE also accumulated a lot of bloat and that need to be cleared also. However in the current state it is quite fast and efficient than Vista. Many usability considerations need be introduced but what is important is to get the whole infrastructure a plug-n-play system (Not only Hardware).

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Re: OT: 'usability' hype
by Aaron J. Seigo on Wednesday 01/Mar/2006, @00:34

> but we need *money* to make the last push

yes, allowing people to concentrate on things full time can certainly help a lot.

of course, it's not a magic bullet, however. there are projects out there that received 7 figures and never produced much to show for that. it needs planning, execution, yadda yadda. all the obvious stuff =) </disclaimer>

there isn't a lot of money being made on open source desktop stuff right now. there is *some* but not a lot. and so funding is pretty scarce as well, no matter where you look. it is better than it was, but we're certainly not on the gravy train yet ;) i think there is room for some innovative business models that target non-enterprise markets that could help bring cash flow into the desktop.

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Re: OT: 'usability' hype
by Segedunum on Wednesday 01/Mar/2006, @14:41

"i think there is room for some innovative business models that target non-enterprise markets that could help bring cash flow into the desktop."

Hmmm. Like what?

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Re: OT: 'usability' hype
by reihal on Wednesday 01/Mar/2006, @22:58

Schools, universities, administrations?

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Re: OT: 'usability' hype
by Segedunum on Thursday 02/Mar/2006, @04:10

"Schools, universities, administrations?"

That's not a businbess model - just possible, potential customers. However, customers and revenue bring up interesting issues.

With what will revenue be brought in and who is going to use and keep that revenue? The distributors, or KDE or other open source projects?

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