Hi Brad,

It sounds to me (and appologize if I am guessing wrong) is that your goal is 
to make Squeak more wide spread, and bring underlying ideas into wider use 
and awarness. My theory is for a software product to achieve that is to:
	- attract more users
	or
	- atract more developers
and I think the recent history (Java, Microsoft's tools, Ruby) shows that 
attracting more developers is the way to do it. Also it may be that creating 
web browsers, email and office suites is the old territory, also, penetration 
against established products would be very difficult. I am not saying let us 
not do it, just speculating on options. I feel that for Squeak its power is 
in unchartered territories, things like Croquet and Tinlizzie (which I 
understand is generally direction of future eToys-like system). 

I think currently Squeak, mostly via eToys, is one of the very few great tools 
for children and non-developers which is great, but I would wish there are 
more developers attracted to Squeak. I read recently that if all the Squeak 
developers are gone, there will be noone developing the tools for kids. Going 
back for a minute to "succeed via attracting more developers", obviously if 
more developers can make some of their living from Squeak, that would be 
great. Also, for _new_ developers, it seems that the development environment 
fell behind it's apprentices, tools like KDevelop, Eclipse, Netbeans are far 
more pleasant and (cough) productive (I am coming from that direction, so 
cannot compare objectively, but feel that is the case). I guess overall I am 
trying to say better developer tools and PR may be a shorter way for Squeak 
promotion, but that does not mean the next great killer app could not be a 
web browser :) . 

Milan

On 2007 January 30 21:05, Brad Fuller wrote:
> All,
>
> I've been wondering how to show the power of objects and the power of an
> environment like smalltalk to everyday users. Probably the best way is
> to provide features within the environment that they can really use
> every day - right out of the box. The idea is secondary to my
> (motivated, but not much action) desire to make Squeak available and
> usable to everyday users.
>
> Today, popular applications are vertical and on disparate OSs. There are
> some applications that talk to one another using different forms of
> communication, depending on the OS. Some mainstream type apps are cross
> platform - like firefox, Thunderbird. But, this bandaid is not the
> vision Alan, Dan, and the rest of the Xerox PARC Learning team had for
> the personal computer and dynabook. I'm sure they can be improved, but I
> really like their ideas. I know I'm preaching to the choir!
>
> It would be nice to reverse the trend, or at the very least provide a
> usable alternative. The world missed a great opportunity in the early
> 80s. Today people really can't customize their environment to their
> needs - and the dynabook vision was just that. I want to see that work.
>
> If the squeak community could provide leadership by creating and
> producing significant features that most people need today, we might get
> the ball rolling for users to start using squeak and for developers to
> see the richness of the environment - and thus start the development
> cycle to provide more features for everyday users. (apps like seaside
> are doing significant work in this area for developers.)
>
> I believe the top applications used today, in popularity order, are:
>
> 1. Email (including calendaring)
> 2. Web
> 3. Word Processing
> 4. Spreadsheet
> 5. Presentation
>
> Maybe I missed something, or maybe I'm wrong -- this is off the top of
> my head. Sounds right, though. (4 of these apps are in the MS Office
> product and 3 in the OpenOffice package.)
>
> If we could concentrate on the first two that included critical modules
> that provided the popular features of an email app and a web browser (so
> users could mix and match and see the greatness of objects working in
> the environment), I think we would have gone a long way to starting this
> re-revolution. And, nothing is stopping us from creating new features
> that would be a boon to productivity. Just think of the cool things
> people could do if the basic building blocks (and examples of how to
> utilize them) were present in squeak? They may do things with email and
> browsing that we never thought of. And, we would be teaching them the
> power of the environment.
>
> Maybe this is a wild idea. But, I actually believe this has been already
> cited - most likely in this mailing list. It seems extremely doable.
> There's nothing technically hard about it. It's more of a coordination
> issue and, of course, a time issue (maybe we can come up with something
> to help the time issue for developers.)
>
> Crazy idea? Is it worth trying to get some people excited about this
> idea and creating some of these modules? Maybe you have a better idea to
> show people the power of the object and a real workable dynabook?
>
> How could we get this rolling? A dedicated team? I can certainly provide
> time for the management of the project(s).
>
> what do you think?