Long day at work, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
JB noticed that my employer now has a blog policy that is… not completely enlightened. Among other things, they want us to remove the link to my employer from my website. Frankly, if they want me to not express pride in my employment at my employer, that is management’s call, but it does seem a little weird :)
Grr. The CD drive failure(?) I mentioned yesterday is getting quite irritating, since I have no fewer than 10 new CDs from amazon sitting around and not a single working CD drive or player at home to play them on. Blah. I guess I’ll rip them at work.
Cool to see that there will be a new XMPP server; I’ve long wanted to set one up for DBR but always been put off by the configuration nightmare. Hopefully this one will be better.
(Last but not least today…) I’m intrigued to read that open office has a marketing strategy– it isn’t a bad idea or anything, but… it only tangentially addresses the serious problems Open Office has as a product. In my humble opinion, OOo should to take a page from the mozilla folks- take a release cycle (or more) and focus exclusively on improving performance and usability. No new features. Even remove features if necessary. This is what firefox has done over mozilla, and that’s done wonders for firefox, both in user uptake and hacker uptake. They’ve gone from dozens of paid hackers to something like ten, and despite that, because of the new focus, still increased market share and hacker interest. If open office focused on those problems for a year, licked the startup time problem, and made (say) preferences less grotesque, I think they’d see a radical improvement in uptake and involvement. Frankly, people are excited about switching from IE to firefox, as far as I can see- it offers something fairly light, quick, and new features virtually every user will use and like. No one except people who loathe Microsoft are excited to switch to open office, and they won’t be until the speed and usability issues with open office are addressed. Sadly, I see no evidence that OOo is focused on these problems- if OOo wants to be competitive and relevant, if it wants to excite people, those must be job #1 for the OOo team.