Marketing strategy

Reinier van Loon R.L.J.M.W.van.Loon at inter.nl.net
Fri Apr 10 20:39:45 UTC 1998


Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:

> I don't want to stop your enthusiasm, 
I have to admit that I am quite enthusiastic about the Squeak initiative.

> but IMHO it's not the Windows look
> and feel but the number of available applications that make people use
> Windows. I use Windows just because of the existance of Winword (and a
> couple of other tools) but not because of the look (and especially not
the
> feel).
OK, but you use it for WinWord (i.e. a wordprocessor - part of the suite).
I noticed that in the daily business routine people use WinWord but get
tired of all the options and buttons when all they want is to type a letter
to a customer. The only ones playing around with macros and difficult
things are in the IS department.

> Actually, I always admired the NeXT computer because of its
> beautifully designed user interface. Even Be's (mac-like?) GUI or Sun's
new
> HotMetal java L&F is nicer to look at than Windows.
There you have an advantage. I never had the chance to look at and feel
them.

> Windows, well, I'm used
> to it but I can't say I really like the design. It's functional and
> definitely better than Squeak's oldish MVC look ;-) but not my reason
> number one. If you want me to use Squeak, implement Java's new look
> (including all that powerful new Swing widgets of course ;-)
I played around with Java but dropped it for Squeak. Have to take a look at
those Swing widgets, though.

> And there's another problem, I think. I don't believe that you can just
> create a GUI which looks like Windows. I don't know Microsoft's exact
> policy but I know that Sun wasn't allowed to provide the Windows look for
> other platforms than Windows PCs.
Yeah, I was afraid of something like that.

....
> I think, somebody already mentioned this idea. If you can combine the
> instruction set of Squeak with the instruction set of Java in one VM, it
> might be possible to host Java based components in a Squeak image. This
> would be interesting for a lot of people, as this would bring Squeak to
the
> masses (of Java programmers).
Interesting alternative. Technically feasible? One thing I still like to
put forward is that we need a 3270 link because there are still loads of
applications running on a mainframe. In my daily work these are still the
prime applications and e.g. the new customer information system is
developed in COBOL and IDMS as database. It is not that hard. I once wrote
it for a OS/2 VSE application (still have the code in Smalltalk and C).
 
Thanks for the response.

Reinier.





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