On 8 Dec 2014, at 17:07, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 03:20:30PM -0500, Mike Pinkerton wrote:
burning your old market when trying to grow a new one. From a
marketing standpoint, that is just crazy. In a for-profit company,
where products are connected to revenue streams, it would be a "you
just bet your career" move which nine times out of ten you would
lose.
The classic Innovators Dilemma actually posits that the reverse
situation is _worse_. (For the record, I don't think we're at that
crisis point — but we could be, because the computing world is
changing.)
The classic Innovator's Dilemma juxtaposes known current requirements
of your market vs. unknown future requirements.
I'm talking about customers you already have vs. customers that you
might like to have, but don't yet have and might possibly never
have. Ditching existing customers in order to court potential
customers is rarely a winning strategy, and really isn't necessary.
But also, we get into the even _more_ classic parable of the blind
people and the elephant — and the recent thread about metrics. You
have
a strong idea of what the primary "classic" Fedora userbase is, and I
have a slightly different one, and I think if we ask the room, we'll
get a dozen different answers. We do need better real knowledge of our
user base — both current and future. Any efforts into improving
that in
a meaningful way are very welcome. (And that includes this
conversation; just because I don't necessarily agree doesn't mean I'm
not listening.)
Sure, knowing the user base is important. Short of that, we do know
who Fedora's previous target users were and, assuming even modest
success, we can assume that some percentage of the user base matches
that range of target users. For those of us who have provided
support for Fedora as a general desktop OS, we also have some idea of
what our local user base is.
In recent years Fedora has been known primarily as a secure by
default Gnome desktop OS. To suggest that anyone interested in a
secure by default Gnome desktop OS should have to resort to a
not-yet-existent spin is to admit that you are abandoning your
current market in search of greener fields elsewhere.
I don't actually think we're abandoning anyone, here. In my
experience,
the classic Fedora user is relatively savvy, or else leans on friends
who are. They tend to take the various parts of the project they like
and shape it — and whether something is on or off by default isn't a
huge concern. (I have a whole checklist of items that I like a certain
way on my system that I'm definitely not going to try to make the
default, and that's fine.)
Yep, enthusiasts were one part of Fedora's previous target user base,
but they weren't all of it. They certainly aren't part of the user
base for which I have to provide support, which is mostly SMB office
users with a smattering of other types.
We could have decided to double-down on growing that enthusiast
segment, but, first, that's not what the people who showed up to do
the
work decided; and second, I actually think we continue to serve the
hackers and tinkerers very nicely with the spins and nonproduct
option.
What we're not doing is expanding
I'm not suggesting that Fedora not expand into a new market segment.
I'm simply suggesting that you not abandon existing users in order to
do so.
I also think you're also kind of setting up an argument against
something no-one is for. "Secure by default" is a not a well-defined
term,
I can't quite parse that, but I think you are intentionally
misunderstanding what I wrote. "Secure by default" might not be a
detailed specification, but it is certainly understood as a general
user expectation, one that I think Fedora has heretofore generally met.
I *will* talk to the designers about plans for presenting the zone
information in a different way. I personally am conscientious about
setting my coffeeshop wifi to "public" — but I know why and where to
dig for it. Making that more discoverable and usable would be a
meaningful improvement.
Perhaps the Workstation team thought that opening up the firewall
defaults was the best compromise. I disagree. Perhaps a better
compromise would have been to leave the old defaults in place, and
add a new pre-configured "more open" zone for those who want fewer
constraints.AAAA
Wait, my last paragraph was a great end to a long message :) but I
need
to also add: please take a look at the actual implementation. The
above
suggestion is _exactly_ what was done.
But which zone is the "out-of-the-box" default?
--
Mike Pinkerton
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