"Big picture" design one release cycle ahead?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday, October 28, 2012 12:22:39 Inge Wallin wrote:
> So who are the intended users?

what i do want to avoid is a system that is really good for the 3 groups you 
listed (or whatever specific market segment(s)) and not great for the rest of 
humanity. there are many reasons for that, but without going into the "why", 
the general tablet using public remains a use case target for me, if not an 
initial target market.

there is a distinction to be made between "who is the software designed to be 
usable by" and "which demographics / target markets do we approach as early 
adopters." 

i'd also add 4: office use

* we have good productivity and groupware apps, the two key items
* activities fit naturally into many typical office workflows
* we do not require 100k apps in an app store to service this market
* there is very little direct targeting of this market by current systems

> 3. Educational organizations. Here I think of both public ones and in-house
...
> So... I bet that these groups have very different needs and priorities. My
> personal interest lies with category 3, but I also think that this group
> needs the most mature system. And I know that Aaron likes to say that "we
> can't play the number-of-apps game" but I think that the lack of apps for
> will be seen as a big problem for this group even though it's not strictly
> a problem for their intended use in itself.

ah, but we don't need to play the number-of-apps game for these people. it's 
perfectly fine if we don't have 100,000 apps covering every city transit 
system, every sports league, etc, etc. we just a need a set of good-to-great 
quality applications with educational focus. if we had 40-50 (or, dreaming, 
100 :) such apps, we'd be able to compete quite effectively based on 
functionality provided that is relevant to this audience.

> It's interesting though to see that the suggested focus for PA4 is books and
> reading. I have the feeling that this suggestion was made before any
> analysis was done about the intended users.

one very common use of tablets is to read books, periodicals and web content.

it is also something we have quite a bit of functionality for already. in 
terms of creating strengths so that we have outstanding features (versus 
larger numbers of mediocre ones) it makes sense to spend some time improving 
this further.

i don't think it should be *the* focus for PA4, however.

> This means that we should try to get group 2 on board as soon as possible.
> And for the long term I don't think we should dismiss compatibility with
> Android out of hand.

no one is dismissing it, but someone needs to do the actual work (and then 
maintain it)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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