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Interview With Shawn Gordon of TheKompany
Gentu writes "OSNews features an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of TheKompany. Shawn talks about version 1.0 of Aethera and Kapital coming out in September, porting a lot of their Qt apps to MacOSX, the future of Linux on the desktop, how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly successful financially for them, as well as selling well their desktop apps. It is really encouraging to read that a desktop-oriented company actually made real money from Linux this year!"
Who cares? The people you are talking about, the average user, is probably only dimly aware they are using Windows. It's not like they chose Windows, it's what their computer came with, it's what their apps run on. They would never do anything so radical as to change OS unless they a) had someone else to install it for them and b) had a compelling reason to change.
Sneaking it in when they aren't looking is a pretty safe bet, it's what allowed MS to succeed.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Is it too much to ask that the blurbs on Slashdot's frontpage should explain what a software package does, instead of just citing the name as if everyone should magically be familiar with them all?
How do we know they made money? The article said nothing about profits, and it's not a publically treaded company.
The other way we differ is that we didn't set out to make an Outlook clone, as a matter of fact the UI designer has never even seen Outlook.
That's great and all. But how can you be a decent UI designer if you have never seen some of the best examples of User Interfaces. Despite not wanting to make a clone of Outlook, there are wonderful UI elements MS created for Outlook and MS Office in general.
You can't just read a book to develop excellent User Interfaces. You have to experience what is out there and build on that with your own and other's insight.
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