[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 08:22 -0800, Timothy D. Witham wrote:
> 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. 

In our experience there are times when those very Enterprises are
willing to make minor chances to their workflow in order to take
advantage of functionality that you're offering.  But for the most part
you're right.  I'm not going to argue about this point too much.

>   
>    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.

I'm pretty comfortable saying that GNOME is not trying to be just like
Windows.  Being just like windows is a clear non-goal.  That doesn't
mean that there aren't people in the GNOME community that haven't used
that as a strategy in the past: the two biggest examples I can think of
off the top of my head are Evolution and Mono.  I feel sad about
Evolution because it's "better than anything else" which means that sunk
cost economics dictate that it's going to take someone who cares more
than me to replace it with something that fits in with the design
philosophy and tries to do something innovative.

> 
> > 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.
> 

Once again, the word useful - entirely subjective.  What's less useful
for you is probably fine for some large set of folks.  And it takes the
focus off the real problem here - a lack of undestanding of design
tradeoffs.

This freaking thread is a hole because people are taking design
decisions so personally.

--Chris