Hi John, interesting topic.
My take on this is that *individual* attempts can be deceptive (for reasons that Suvayu raised), but *collective* attempts are always somehow successful. By "individual attempts" I mean face-to-face demos and preaching, which can help some Emacs users discover how they could use Emacs more effectively for notes and TODO lists, but will surely fail at convincing non-Emacs users. (Oh, btw, the above is not entirely true: I recently participated to a Vim-dedicated informal group, where I picked up many useful Vim tricks, and I was surprised to see that many Vimers just love Org's tables --- to the point that they have tricks to display Org tables in Vim buffers...) By "collective attempts", I mean contributions to the vast pool of Org tutorials/demos/screencasts. This is how we ensure potential users will get an impression that "this is easy to do with Org", which is the main feeling you need to have to test it. Think of it as "low floor, high ceilings": power users push for higher ceilings, while neebies push for low floors. We can deal with high ceilings by interacting on the list, but we are better at lowering floors by contributing with tutorials, blog entries, etc. Just try to write something simple, it may convert more people you know that oral preaching near the coffee machine :) My 2 cents of course, -- Bastien
