PR and the release of KOffice 1.4 (beta)
Inge Wallin <inge <at> lysator.liu.se>
2005-04-27 19:07:13 GMT
Fellow KOfficers,
It is with some hesitation that I write this mail...
What we have in front of us is the release of the most comprehensive free
office suite in existence. It might not be the best if you look at it and
compare it to the other office suites component by component. Let's be honest
with ourselves here; for instance both Gnumeric and Oocalc is better than
KSpread and KWord is not as good as neither Abiword nor Oowriter.
What we do have, however, is a more comprehensive suite than any other.
Abiword and Gnumeric might be very good, but the concept of Gnome office is a
joke (and you Gnome people who are snooping here would do good to be honest
with yourself as well. 
). And the much heralded Open Office doesn't have
a counterpart to neither Kexi, Kivio, Karbon nor Krita.
In addition to that this office suite is, in contrast to all others, well
integrated into the most used and popular free desktop environment on the
face of the earth.
We must make this release notable!
Traditionally, most of the hype surrounding the free desktops has been around
Gnome. The reason for this is probably the bigger corporate involvement in
Gnome and a more visible leadership cadre. Also, Gnome has its leadership in
America, a country well known for its skill in PR. Still, KDE manages to
capture more users and get higher user ratings than the other desktops.
Don't get me wrong here. I think that part of the reason that KDE is so good
is that it competes and cooperates with other worthy desktops. The healthy
competition and cross-fertilisation of ideas make all desktops better.
However, I think it is a pity that KDE, being the best desktop, has always had
the worst PR. Or let me rephrase that: has always had the least visible PR.
So I want to have a very big splash when KOffice 1.4 is released. We as
developers must make this release the best that we can. We must do two
things:
1. We must make the programs as easy to use as possible. This phase is now
over since the feature freeze has become active.
2. We must concentrate to fix the most important bugs that are left. These are
the ones that users will encounter the most often, the ones that prevent them
from doing their work. This is our main task from now and 3 weeks into the
future.
Remember: People *will* check out KOffice and see if it is a worthy contender.
Journalists *will* write reviews in the papers and people *will* read these
and get their opinions from them.
But in addition to that, I want to see the KDE PR people get involved in this.
I want journalists contacted, I want news sites informed. I want KOffice to
become the "second free office suite" just after Open office. This is a good
position to be so that it can become the "Default Office Suite" when Open
Office gets bogged down in java and clunky code, loses developers and SUN
starts to shrink the resources that it pours into it. This might take a
number of years, but it will probably happen.
If this was a company, it would be easy. We would just tell the marketing
department "make it so". But it isn't. So we have to do it ourselves!
Developers! *Please* concentrate on the most important bugs right now.
Everybody! *Please* find out what *you* can do to spread the news
David! Feel our support for your release work. (And how do you plan to "make
it so"? )
-Inge
--
--
Inge Wallin | Thus spake the master programmer: |
| "After three days without programming, |
inge <at> lysator.liu.se | life becomes meaningless." |
| Geoffrey James: The Tao of Programming. |
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