On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 21:54 +0100, Jon K Hellan wrote: > However, if we decide to target a niche audience, on a niche operating > system, that's niche squared. I doubt if that's sustainable. > Didn't say niche, I said specific. The group can still be large. There are many, many well-defined subsets of the world's billions of people that still contain a hell of a lot of people.
And the whole point here is to remove the nicheness of the software (whether it's an OS, I don't know), by appealing strongly to a specific group that wants to use it. Would you expect a sports car with a truck bed to appeal to more people than a regular truck or regular sports car? I would not. Not choosing an audience doesn't mean you appeal to everyone. It means you appeal to everyone in some ways *and* make everyone hate you in some ways, so nobody really likes you overall. What you want to do is be sure some group of people likes you in *almost all important respects*. The fallacy is to think that indecisiveness avoids the decision and leads to universal appeal. It does not. It leads to either a de facto decision (best case), or a totally incoherent piece of software (worst case). Sure, the trick is in picking a group that's specific enough but not too niche, and in trying to appeal to multiple "similar enough" groups, while not breaking your appeal by chasing overly-dissimilar groups. But life is full of judgment calls, no? Havoc _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list