FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[William Jon McCann]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 13:50 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
>
>> OK, so here's the problem with this.  Compromise sometimes works well
>> when trying to form rough consensus, or for finding the least
>> disagreeable position for the most people - for politics maybe.
>> However, it does not work well as a technique for designing products
>> that people love to use.  When you find the middle ground between
>> great and awful you don't find good - you find mediocrity and malaise.
>>  Please read http://headrush.typepad.com/ for more on this topic.
>>
>> We've been designing compromised products for far too long.  We need
>> to acknowledge that we can't please everyone all the time and need to
>> make choices.  We need to resolve to be great - it doesn't just happen
>> by accident.
>
> Sorry, but I think you're picking entirely the wrong case to try and
> make your point. Try as hard as I can, I can't see how it would be
> better to have the Brave New World mixer and a wiki page instructing
> people on how to use alsamixer than it is to have the Brave New World
> mixer and a second mixer application available in the menus. The total
> cost to the design of the desktop is: one additional menu entry. I'm
> really having a hard time seeing how this is a terrible design decision.

Look, calling our design the "Brave New World mixer" doesn't
particularly make you come across as someone we should be listening
to.  And frankly, if you can't see why it is dumb to have two entries
in the menu for controlling your sound and volume then well maybe we
shouldn't be listening to you.  Also, seems like a bad decision to
want to QA two entirely separate code paths for doing essentially the
same thing.

Jon