IMHO, the two biggest threats to Slim Devices' competitive advantage are:
* Product design - most 'normal' people think the Roku styling is better.
Maybe. Personally, I think basic functionality and reliability are far more important. Then again, my Squeezeboxes are all black.
* Simple software installation - most 'normal' people can't (or can't be bothered) to spend hours reconfiguring their computer to get an application running - if it doesn't work reliably straight from the tin, they'll just send it back and move on.
Absolutely!
The second produces a major dilemma - the opensource community is notoriously geeky and seems to just love wading though reams of poorly documented or undoccumented source code to re-configure it for some strange combination of a Linux installation. But if the company concentrates on supporting and making the software work seamlessly with Windows and iUnix, it will probably alienate the geeks.
I don't think that's really a big dilemma. These sorts of "sponsored open source" projects work best when the volunteers work on the features that personally interest them, and the commercial sponsor acts as the project "glue" -- merging patches, conducting regression testing, and managing the release cycle. I can't see how any geek could oppose the mere existence of a stable Windows version (though that's arguably a contradiction in terms) so long as the code he's interested in remains open and hackable.
What I *do* find discouraging is the distressing unreliability of even the 5.4 version of the server software. I shouldn't have to install the version du jour just to get a fix for a bug that keeps crashing my server in routine usage.
There ought to be two code bases: a relatively stable, no-frills version with an emphasis on robustness, and an experimental version with all the latest gimmicks. As new features prove themselves and become stable, they can be backported to the stable version. This is hardly a novel concept; it's worked very well for Linux.
Most of the volunteers would probably prefer to play with the experimental release, while the people at Slim Devices would maintain the stable version. After all, their product is pretty much useless without a server to drive it.
--Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
