h.g. muller wrote:
[...]
Lack of a smart bundling strategy is the prime cause of the decline of
WinBoard amongst Windows users. They move
to other GUIs that do provide all-in-one. People demand that nowadays.
I'm not sure I agree with that. What evidence is there?
I know winboard has declined in popularity among players on chess
servers. In that demographic, the problem isn't bundling, but that the
opposition is more appealing, generally more intuitive, and more
cross-platform (babas works great in wine). That's not going to change
no matter what how we bundle winboard. Jin and BabasChess pretty much
dominate the free category, and there is Arena too.
For running engines on a chess server, winboard is still very popular
for casual users. The only other reasonable choices for them are
ChessPartner and Arena. Those running winboard already may even decide
there's too much hassle to switch to 4.4.0 because it's set up so
differently from the way they currently run. I personally know a few
people who have tried 4.4.0, and are back to running 4.2.7. I haven't
asked them why-- I guess I should. Again, a bundling strategy isn't
going to change much here.
Some advanced engine operators may run winboard. But I think icsdrone
and xboard are a lot more popular for advanced 24/7 types. There are
several custom icsdrone versions out there, most of which you would
never know were icsdrone at all. Nobody in this category is going to
change how they operate.
Who else is there? Just people who play against engines. I don't have
the foggiest idea about this group, but I suspect almost nobody uses
winboard, nor have any desire to. They use chessmaster, chessbase,
shredder, doesn't rybka have a gui?
Face it. Winboard is an advanced program for relatively advanced
users. You can try to make it easier for them by bundling, but I don't
think that's really the job of the winboard project. And I don't see it
having any significant impact on "winboard market share." I'm not sure
that's really a concern of the winboard project anyway.
