On Friday 13 May 2011 18:57:47 Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 12:56:27PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote
> 
> > On Wed, 11 May 2011 20:40:02 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > > > KDE devs decided to take the risk and make the jump ahead of the
> > > > curve.
> > > > 
> > >   Coca Cola went from Coke Classic to New Coke; at least they had the
> > > 
> > > guts to admit that it was a bad idea, and reverse it.
> > > 
> > >   IBM walked away from their market leading AT.  Rather than put a 386
> > > 
> > > cpu on the motherboard, they went with the PS/2 design, which bombed.
> > > 
> > >   Micropro *OWNED* word-processing with a DOS-port of their cpm-based
> > > 
> > > Wordstar product.  People were begging and pleading with them to patch
> > > it to recognize subdirectories.  Instead, Micropro dropped Wordstar,
> > > and came up with a "user friendly" menu-driven abortion called
> > > Wordstar 2000.  That was the end.
> > > 
> > >   Do you see a pattern here?
> > 
> > The pattern I see is that of selecting only changes that failed and
> > implying they are the norm.
> > 
> > Why not add other improvements that were so bad, like the switch from
> > floppy disks to hard disks, or CDs to DVDs? Companies try to predict
> > where the market should go so they can lead. No one gets it right all
> > the time, the ones that survive are those that get it right often enough.
> > The ones that are most likely to fail are those that never try to
> > innovate in case someone doesn't like it.
> 
>   Floppy disks were being sold long after hard disks were invented.
> Ditto for CDs after DVDs came out.  If Coca Cola had brought out "New
> Coke" *IN ADDITION TO" "Coke Classic", it wouldn't have been a problem.
> "New Coke" would've died more quickly, and Coca Cola wouldn't have seen
> so much backlash.  Corporations (IBM's biggest customers) were begging
> and pleading for ATs with a 386 CPU, not proprietary PS/2s.  IBM ceased
> to manufacture ATs, and said PS/2s or nothing.  IBM is no longer a force
> in the corporate desktop market.  If Micropro had added directory
> support to Wordstar 3.3, it would've been around a lot longer, and
> Wordstar 2000 wouldn't have been the death blow it was.
> 
>   Hard drives and DVDs competed against their predecessors and won.
> They were obviously superior.  But if your new and allegedly "improved"
> product can't stand on its own 2 feet and compete against older
> generation products, and you have to shut down or drop support for the
> older products for the new one to survive, then it's obvious that the
> "new and improved" product is a piece of crap.

You are confusing matters.

The launch of "new & improved" product is often a matter of designed 
obsolescence of the old product for the purpose of generating additional 
sales.  In a (pseudo)competitive capitalistic model this is what most consumer 
goods have been doing, canibalising their own previous generation of products.

In a FOSS model this argument does not stand or make much sense.  I think that 
the KDE devs made a strategic design decision and took KDE4 in a different 
direction than KDE3.  Some of us we happier with the KDE3 ... a selection of 
apps, rather that a heavy duty integrated DE with semantic searches and what 
not.

What is common between your examples and KDE is (perhaps?) the lack of 
adequate market research and testing.

What-ever, life moves on of course and the wrinkles on KDE4 are being ironed 
out.
-- 
Regards,
Mick