> "Joshua D. Drake" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Actually I don't agree with this. People that are going to really want > to run LSMB are already running FireFox. There are of course the > exceptions but Firefox (which is actually set to hit 20%) is the FOSS > browser of choice. > > Not to mention, its all about killing the fly with a cannon. Oh, you > hate quickbooks? Oh you like LedgerSMB? Well you need Firefox... 6 weeks > later... > > "" Wow, I really like this Firefox thing..." > > Bingo! > >
I believe the question comes down to who your customers are. I can't tell you what you should do because I don't know who your customers are, or the type of customers you aspire to obtain. If your typical customer you aspire to get is similar to me with a handful of employees, then yes you can stick with the minority browser and folks like me will move to it. Like I said earlier, I actually prefer Firefox over IE. When you start targeting 100+ or even 1000+ employee companies though, that changes things considerably. It now becomes a support question for those companies to consider adding a new browser into the mix. Keep in mind that these companies will have other applications they use and it is very possible that those other applications may only be supported using IE (i.e. require ActiveX). For these types of companies, they may like LedgerSMB, but wouldn't consider it if it meant they had to support two browser environments due to additional costs for learning, security, etc. Again, if your target market is 1-25 employees then yes you can probably force customers to use Firefox. Techies like you or I love Firefox. Ask some of your non-techy friends what browser they use, both at home and work, just as a sanity check. The same logic can be applied when it comes to RDBMS that LedgerSMB supports. I am not suggesting you should support other RDBMS, but to weight that against the potential customers you are targeting. Again, many companies will look at this from a support perspective. What is the cost to them to support a new RDBMS considering it may require new skills, new education, new hardware, etc. Obviously, you are considering the support costs from a LedgerSMB perspective as you should. I am not telling you what you should due, but instead just giving you a different perspective to consider. With my day job, the clients I work with measure revenues in terms of millions of dollars (even billions) so clearly my experience may not be applicable to LederSMB since I suspect not too many companies of this size would consider using LedgerSMB in the first place, at least not at this time. The question is what will companies in the 100-1000 employees range want and is this the type of company you want to target. Please don't take what I say as disagreement, just food for thought. One last point and let me first say I haven't given this much thought so clearly there may be strong arguments against what I say here. The browser UI in general is very limited especially when it comes to POS. It is improving though as new approaches are introduced (i.e. Ajax). Maybe having a Java based UI would provide an attractive alternative to the browser and would run on a variety of OSs. Before you say it, I realize that the LedgerSMB development team may not be interested in developing such a thing and that someone could fork and create their own. What I am suggesting though is to give some thought to possibly developing an open framework or API to allow someone to develop a UI (in Java, VB, or whatever) and to easily be able to connect it to LedgerSMB via its API. Maybe that is already there, I don't know. Again, food for thought. Best Regards, Steven Marshall Taty Lee Boutique 11705 Jones Bridge Rd., B206 Alpharetta, GA 30005 770-410-6964 "Once you experience the stylish comfort of Brazilian-cut jeans, you will demand nothing less!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-users
