Re: Interesting coverage of our project on the SQL-Ledger-users list

[..hidden..]

> "Joshua D. Drake" <..hidden..> 
> 
> Actually I don't agree with this. People that are going to really want
> to run LSMB are already running FireFox. There are of course the
> exceptions but Firefox (which is actually set to hit 20%) is the FOSS
> browser of choice. 
> 
> Not to mention, its all about killing the fly with a cannon. Oh, you
> hate quickbooks? Oh you like LedgerSMB? Well you need Firefox... 6 weeks
> later...
> 
>  "" Wow, I really like this Firefox thing..."
> 
> Bingo!
> 
> 

I believe the question comes down to who your customers are.  I can't tell 
you what you should do because I don't know who your customers are, or the 
type of customers you aspire to obtain.  If your typical customer you 
aspire to get is similar to me with a handful of employees, then yes you 
can stick with the minority browser and folks like me will move to it. 
Like I said earlier, I actually prefer Firefox over IE.  When you start 
targeting 100+ or even 1000+ employee companies though, that changes 
things considerably.  It now becomes a support question for those 
companies to consider adding a new browser into the mix.  Keep in mind 
that these companies will have other applications they use and it is very 
possible that those other applications may only be supported using IE 
(i.e. require ActiveX).  For these types of companies, they may like 
LedgerSMB, but wouldn't consider it if it meant they had to support two 
browser environments due to additional costs for learning, security, etc. 
Again, if your target market is 1-25 employees then yes you can probably 
force customers to use Firefox.  Techies like you or I love Firefox.  Ask 
some of your non-techy friends what browser they use, both at home and 
work, just as a sanity check.  The same logic can be applied when it comes 
to RDBMS that LedgerSMB supports.  I am not suggesting you should support 
other RDBMS, but to weight that against the potential customers you are 
targeting.  Again, many companies will look at this from a support 
perspective.  What is the cost to them to support a new RDBMS considering 
it may require new skills, new education, new hardware, etc.  Obviously, 
you are considering the support costs from a LedgerSMB perspective as you 
should.  I am not telling you what you should due, but instead just giving 
you a different perspective to consider.  With my day job, the clients I 
work with measure revenues in terms of millions of dollars (even billions) 
so clearly my experience may not be applicable to LederSMB since I suspect 
not too many companies of this size would consider using LedgerSMB in the 
first place, at least not at this time.  The question is what will 
companies in the 100-1000 employees range want and is this the type of 
company you want to target.  Please don't take what I say as disagreement, 
just food for thought.  One last point and let me first say I haven't 
given this much thought so clearly there may be strong arguments against 
what I say here.  The browser UI in general is very limited especially 
when it comes to POS.  It is improving though as new approaches are 
introduced (i.e. Ajax).  Maybe having a Java based UI would provide an 
attractive alternative to the browser and would run on a variety of OSs. 
Before you say it, I realize that the LedgerSMB development team may not 
be interested in developing such a thing and that someone could fork and 
create their own.  What I am suggesting though is to give some thought to 
possibly developing an open framework or API to allow someone to develop a 
UI (in Java, VB, or whatever) and to easily be able to connect it to 
LedgerSMB via its API.  Maybe that is already there, I don't know.  Again, 
food for thought.

Best Regards,
Steven Marshall

Taty Lee Boutique
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