On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 9:33 AM, David Orman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> If you give an average person the current 2008.5 cd, would you wager >> they'd successfully be able to install it on their hardware, update it to >> the most recent release, and perform all other necessary/wise things? But the current distro is not aimed at average people, right? Give us a few releases to get there. However, I must say, I'm probably the least technical person on this list, and I did just as you outlined above from reading /only/ this list and whatever the distro prompted me to do. I had very few difficulties. And trust me, I have little patience for technology. Dennis Clarke wrote: > However ( you knew that was coming right? ) there is a key factor we > need to address. Who is the target market? If the target market is the > Microsoft Windows user then we are dead in the water. Why? There are gazillions of them out there who are in pain to one degree or another. Why not consider at least the higher end ones a potential (or secondary) market along with other markets? They are not our initial market, surely, but we'll be meeting them everywhere we go. Here in Asia, it's perfectly normal to ask a room of 250 people what system they use at work and at home and to have the vast majority of hands go up for Windows -- not Linux. And the fact that very few hands go up for OpenSolaris is excellent. It means we have gigantic markets to go carve out. > You would need > an OS that installs itself, configures itself, makes coffee and burbs > the baby all at the same time. Can Windows do all of that now? Linux? Mac comes closest, I supposed. > Good luck. We will *never* hit that > market segment and why in God's name would you want to? Careful with that "never" word. :) People said we'd never open Solaris. Never take code back. Never get a new installer and new packaging. Look, we don't necessarily have to make MS Windows the center of our target (currently, it's not), but as we get easier to use, and as we grow in rapidly expanding markets /outside/ the US and Europe, we'll surely bump into those guys. It's inevitable. > The revenue > implications are horrendous. R&D costs would spin out of control as > would support infrastructure to care for a 1% market segment if you > are lucky. > > Is the target market the existing Linux user? He should be one, sure. > If so then you are in > far better position to hand a CDROM to John Doe Linux geek and say > "boot this and then install it." Linux geek or Linux user? Which one? Big difference. I think we have to watch the terms we are using. We are using developer, user, average user, geek, etc, and these things are not necessarily well defined many times. > With a nice pointer to some README > notes. They will figure it out just fine and if they can not then > again I have to ask Who cares? So what? You are not going to get 1% of > the user market because you need to draw in the Linux users who are > already only 2% or 3% of the entire user market. I'm talking about end > users here, not servers. With all the GNOME stuff pushed into > OpenSolaris then we have to assume that the target is the Linux end > user. > > Is the target market the developer? Yep. > The programer in a university > somewhere? Yep. Absolutely. In fact, I's say China and India specifically. Here is some info on China: http://www.qyjohn.net/?p=466 > That can NOT be the case because OpenSolaris ships with no > compiler and no system headers even if the compiler was included. If > the target market is supposed to be the programmer then someone forget > to give them GCC 4.x at the very *minimum*. > It also shipped with no office suite, but presumably, that's easy to add. One thing at a time. :) > So then ... who is the market ? > I don't think it's one market, per say. I think initially it's a few closely related markets engaged in a reasonable sequence based on business and technical requirements and also new opportunities. See Tim's slides/audio from the planning meeting: http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Indiana#OpenSolaris_Community_Strategy_Planning_Meeting * 2008.05: target developers, get additional packages into the repository, * 2008.11 (nov 08): continue IPS/Install work, flush out desktop, target web 2.0 ISV ecosystem, get partners on board, SPARC developer story, rudimentary SPARC support possible * April 09: Target enterprise market: grow deployments on SPARC and x64 To me, that's a couple of markets, but they are all pretty high end, and they are focused on developers initially. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
