Dan Ingalls wrote:
... As technologists, we repeatedly underestimate the importance of marketing and, even when we know we need to promote our systems, we fail because the skills of marketing are not simply technical skills.
Marketing should not be something which is done by non-technologists only, it is about keeping the user as the central focus of "all" activities. As you said, its about who the users are, and also about what their expectations are and how to best address these. Dan Ingalls wrote:
... Now it is mostly running in "the" browser, and communicating over the web....
Agree! Dan Ingalls wrote:
...Smalltalk has always suffered from two main barriers: installation and integration. Once you have it installed, and if you don't need to access anything outside, it is unmatched in its ability to make simple things simply, and to achieve complex goals as well...
I think Gilad was onto something with his "Objects as Software Services" talk at OOPSLA 2005 about not just the installation, but also the continuos upgrade process. For systems running in the cloud it may be a different story again? Dan Ingalls wrote:
In the world of today, people expect any new thing of interest to spring to life in their browser. They expect it to look attractive, cool, powerful; anything but geeky...
Agree again. Dan Ingalls wrote:
We expect it to be immediately useful. For a computer language, this means you can immediately try out some expressions and make something happen. We want this. We are busy, and we don't have time to download a new environment, figure out a new browser, learn a new graphics system, right? We expect it to be incremental - do some work, save it, pick it up later - we expect the comforts of Smalltalk-style development....
The "download a new environment" may not mean to a local machine, because I would like to add that we also expect to pick it up anywhere and probably also on any device! -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Few-thoughts-about-Google-Summer-of-Code-tp3018404p302... Sent from the ESUG mailing list archive at Nabble.com.