RE: 7.5 release? - How you can help

["Erik Jessen" <ejessen at adelphia dot net>]

I'm used to look at this from a marketing point of view:

1) how many customers will we lose if we drop support for X
	(in this case, Win95, Win98, WinME, since it is my understanding
	that all of them suffer from the memory problem).
2) how many new customers will we get if we put the same effort
	to support X, into adding new/cool features for all the other
	OSes?

My thought is that in a year or two, given HW replacement cycle times,
that few will be running the old windows OSes, and that the same work
into upgrading Xconq would get more people interested.

The key to getting more new users, is make it easy to build a simple
game.
By the time they climb that learning curve, they're going to start
learning how to write more complicated stuff.  If the intitial curve is
too high, they'll just walk away.

I have a couple of friends who want to do a railroading game, and Xconq
wuild be ideal, but the map-drawing GUI is less than clear on how to use
it.  I figured it out, but they will just give up after a while.

Regards,
Erik

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 8:07 AM
To: Erik Jessen
Cc: 'Hans Ronne'; xconq7@sources.redhat.com
Subject: RE: 7.5 release? - How you can help

Hi Erik,

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Erik Jessen wrote:

> Well, just to ask, how many people on this list know anybody still
> running 98?

I know some who still do. I think that is primarily used on 
laptops nowadays. 98 (including 98SE) enjoyed a somewhat extended 
lifetime because Me wasn't exactly Microsoft's best release (to 
put it nicely). And a lot of organizations I have dealt with run 
on a 4 to 5 year upgrade cycle, which means 98 is still out 
there, and, yes, people do install games on their organizations' 
computers.

> What about putting counters on the downloads for the various OSes, so
> you can tell what OSes are going out of favor?  This is only of
> long-term use, of course, and won't help with source-code downloads.

Well, actually browsers usually do provide not only their name, 
but also the OS they are running on. If one assumes that the 
browser OS is the same one which Xconq is going to be compiled on, 
then one can get a fairly decent picture about what platforms are 
being used for Xconq.

But since Xconq seems to be a fairly low volume download, one 
would need to have an extended sampling period to create accurate 
statistics. And the sampling period would likely have to be longer 
than the time it would take to fix issues on the platform(s) in 
question.

  Regards,
    Eric