[Council] Influence Nokia by voting in a poll on N900 multitasking - Page 4 - maemo.org

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	Texrat	2010-09-09 , 21:18
	Posts: 11,700 \| Thanked: 10,045 times \| Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA	#31

Originally Posted by jnwi

I agree with you, but on the other hand I also believe that to make geeks happy you have to make the mass market happy. We're not entirely different, we're a superset. The most frequent complaints on this very site are about stuff that s40 does better. And you could've found out about that exactly by listening to the mass market.

So even if I'm restating what you're saying, I think we need to be more precise and say that a winning product satisfies *all* the needs of the geeks, not just the *geeky* needs of the geeks. When I read about focusing on geeks, I think about things like the terminal application, but that's only half of the picture.

Well, obviously "geek" is broader than the stereotype. I'm an old school terminal command-line coder from the DOS/Unix shell days, but I still loves me a sweet GUI.

So let me qualify by saying socially-adept, broad-minded geeks. Satisfy that class, and you have a dynamite product.

But I disagree that satisfying the average user will usually trickle up to geeks in general. The Apple example makes the point. You can easily please the masses and lose true geeks.

I see the most frequent complaints about what enterprise tools do better-- but maybe we focus on different threads.

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Different <> Wrong | Listen - Judgment = Progress | People + Trust = Success
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The Following User Says Thank You to Texrat For This Useful Post:
lma

Fedmahn Kassad	2010-09-09 , 21:50
Posts: 23 \| Thanked: 11 times \| Joined on Aug 2010	#32

Originally Posted by Texrat

That one I can get-- I just can't see the concept of community as overrated.

Well, I am one of the moderators of the German dslr-forum for DSLR Cameras. We are residing on rank 2 worldwide for forums about cameras:
http://www.big-boards.com/kw/cameras/
Having about 250000 registered users and a all camera producers on board, I can tell you for sure, that 95% of our posts are more or less useless....
Here we have much more useful posts, because users are high expertise geeks. Both kinds of communities are overrated. There is a lot of work needed to extract knowledge from our mass forum there. There is also a lot of work to translate the geek experience here into mass compatible concepts. We have discussed this all with camera producers like Canon, Nikon and Pentax. That is my conclusion, Communities are overrated but you can't ignore them.
It is good that Nokia is attending us here. But it is a too easy just to ask about multitasking. Take the example iPhone again. The OS is able to handle multitasking. The didn't only cut that of. There are notification services for example implemented for Skype so it starts when someone wants to contact you while you are doing something else on your phone. So there is an idea and concept behind that. Mutlitasking means cpu usage and that will reduce battery life. That is one of the reasons for Apple avoiding that. My hint wasn't intended to be nonconstructive. My intention was hoping to get into a good way of discussion. Communities turn into something wonderful when you work with them, especially high expertise communities. But that is some long-term return on invest thing. IBM is demonstrating that in the field of open source development. But they invest a lot...
All in all thanks to Nokia for the poll.

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lma	2010-09-09 , 22:27
Posts: 2,802 \| Thanked: 4,491 times \| Joined on Nov 2007	#33

Originally Posted by Texrat

But I disagree that satisfying the average user will usually trickle up to geeks in general.

Indeed, most of the time it's the other way around. Products that appeal to/pass the test of geeks (and suits, funnily enough there's a large intersection there) tend to be very successful in the mass market as well. Examples include Symbian, Palm and even Apple once upon a time.

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	Texrat	2010-09-09 , 22:36
	Posts: 11,700 \| Thanked: 10,045 times \| Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA	#34

Originally Posted by Fedmahn Kassad

Having about 250000 registered users and a all camera producers on board, I can tell you for sure, that 95% of our posts are more or less useless....
Here we have much more useful posts, because users are high expertise geeks. Both kinds of communities are overrated. There is a lot of work needed to extract knowledge from our mass forum there. There is also a lot of work to translate the geek experience here into mass compatible concepts. We have discussed this all with camera producers like Canon, Nikon and Pentax. That is my conclusion, Communities are overrated but you can't ignore them.

I do understand your points but disagree with the conclusion drawn from them. Maybe I'm being pedantic but the conclusion I pull from them is:

Communities are noisy, and a good chunk of activity is overrated. But not the community in and of itself.

In a well-established and managed communities, the signal may be significantly smaller than the noise BUT there are mechanisms in place that make sure signal rises high above. This forum does okay but with a few tweaks could do much, much better (weeding Off Topic posts from Active Topics was one valuable step toward that).

So in the end, even 95% noise shouldn't matter and certainly shouldn't devalue any community (much less the broad concept). The trick is to let noise be noise and float the cream to the top over it.

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Different <> Wrong | Listen - Judgment = Progress | People + Trust = Success
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shadowjk	2010-09-09 , 23:33
Posts: 1,258 \| Thanked: 672 times \| Joined on Mar 2009	#35

Originally Posted by jnwi

The battery reliability issue is huge. My N900 is amazing 99% of the time, but when I'm abroad I'm so scared of that one percent chance something random will drain my battery that I switch to my Symbian phone. I don't agree that the solution is to cripple multitasking, though. There should be an alarm if the CPU is too active for more than 5 minutes with the screen off, imho..

SpeedEvil's power monitoring script is a start for a method of collecting data usable for determining abnormal power use. It monitors process wakeups and last 5sec average current consumption. Add to that a "data traffic last 5 secs yes/no" figure, and you're close to have most things covered..

The thing that hits me occasionally is people trying to bruteforce my ssh password over 2g/3g, it eats a constant 200-350mA

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	Helmuth	2010-09-10 , 19:43
	Posts: 1,259 \| Thanked: 1,341 times \| Joined on Oct 2009 @ Germany	#36

Originally Posted by Fedmahn Kassad

So my advice, don't focus on geeks or nerds.

Hmm... I don't belief so. I want only to answer with a short part of a post from me I wrote here at June related to maemo / meego and our community full of geeks: (follow the link to read also the beginning if you're interested)

The freaks purchase the new devices as soon as they arrive. The average acquire a new device every 2 years with a new contract. You can't attract them with a new device every 6 month only with bugfixing.

And I'm sure, then the userbase will grow strong. At the beginning mostly linux freaks... but this are the developers of tomorrow. With a pleased community the positiv sentiment will spread itself all over the internet (blogs, chats, icq, forum, wikis and at least the old print media) and Nokia could get a self marketing device for the mass market. (look again at Apple)

It's very Important: Implementing of missing features and Bug fixing has to be done. NOKIA needs customers which speaks after 2 years about it as "great device, the best I ever had". But when they say instead: "same software problems since the beginning, not well done" they wouldn't buy the next device. If Nokia gets rid of all unfinished feeling with the software during the device lifetime the users have at the end of this time a positive feeling. They majority has the problems in the beginning forgotten and go to buy the next, new Device. Otherwise I would say rather not.
It's very easy: Happy Customer are loyal Customer!

You have to attract the geeks at first. Apple had his loyal userbase from the Mac and the iPod. They bought the device first...
Google announced Android as Linux based, and the Geeks glee. After the geeks showed the devices to their friends google got the ball rolling. Now some geeks are still at Android, others here at Maemo because they want a more open Linux system. The most of them wouldn't recommend the N900 to the normal users because of the problems maemo still has. This has to be changed ASAP.