A while ago, I saw an interesting development idea I thought I’d pass on. Work on KOffice is proceeding by targeting a specific user.
Target the application for one specific user and make it perfect for him/her. Then hope that it’s good enough for other users as well.
Honestly, I don’t know how well it will work. There’s the potential to cause problems by being so targeted that it’s unusable by anyone else. 🙂 But I have to say that this makes a lot of sense. Most open source projects, if they were just stable enough for any user to use, they’d come a long way. They may even come up with a couple features no one has thought of yet, but I doubt it. I suspect that they’ll mostly be checking off features they’re used to using elsewhere. As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t get many switchers by just matching features. But, if they can check off some important features and add a game-changing feature that could work.