[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Timothy D. Witham]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 01:55 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 20:42 -0800, Timothy D. Witham wrote:
> >    I will give you an example.  I've been using Evolution
> > since 2001 and every release has removed something
> > from the way I worked.  Made it a little less friendly to
> > me and a little more of  a pain in the ass to use.  I used
> > to really push Evolution to folks but since 2.0 I say "I
> > use it because I have been using it.  And if asked I
> > will say that I really feel that it is broken for my usage
> > model and that I have zero hope of it getting fixed."
> 
> Evolution is a _great_ example for this discussion because it fits
> exactly into our design discussion;  That is, it's designed for the
> "Enterprise Market."  Put someone who isn't part of a large corporation
> and doesn't want to think about scheduling and task lists and calendars
> and meetings in front of it and they will say "what in the hell is all
> this stuff for" and will likely get fed up and walk away.  It's just not
> designed for home users.  (Actually, I think that Evolution was just an
> Outlook clone and therefore ended up in the Enterprise by effect instead
> of as an explicit design choice.  But anyway...)
> 
   Then you are missing the point.  One thing about enterprises is
that they really want to be able to configure systems the way that
they want to use them.  If they don't then there is no reason to leave
the MS Windows environment as they already make all of the choices
for them. 
  
   It seems that the Gnome/Evolution path has become "We are
just like the MS interface."   The MS interface is broken for
corporate users.   You can't configure things and you end up
going into the registry  to hand edit things and ending up breaking
something else. 

    I think that we had the discussion that a strategy of just following
the incumbent and doing what they do isn't compelling for anybody
to move to Linux but that seems to be the strategy here.

> Mail.app is closer to home user patterns but it turns out that the
> ultimate clients for people like that are the web-based ones.  Yahoo and
> gmail basically own that space these days.  We're completely out of that
> market.
> 
> Different tools for different folks.
> 
> > 
> >    I don't need it to come out with my settings as the
> > default.  I'm all for default settings to make things
> > easy to use for a novice but when you remove the 
> > functionality so that an expert user can't get the
> > full value then that is a failure.
> 
> I wouldn't jump from "removing functionality" to "failure."  I think
> that it's safe to say that maybe we've not made it right for you, but
> that's a design decision, not a failure.
> 
    Sorry but that is the definition of failure - making something
less useful is failure.   I used to recommend Evolution to corporations
looking for a Linux mail client.  I no longer do that.

Tim

> --Chris
-- 
Timothy D. Witham - Chief Technology Officer - wookie at osdl.org
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