Wine, the windows emulator for Linux, is going nowhere - for good reason. Wine is an open source project relying on input and effort from volunteers. The Wine website explains the rational for the community's efforts (see also OS/2, Microsoft and Open Source) as aiming to provide an alternative to Microsoft's quasi monopoly in desktop operating systems by allowing those Windows applications to which we are now accustomed and find hard to do without to run under Linux. Yet 5 years after the release of Office 2003 SP1, the service pack install fails. Given the popularity of MS Office, appropriately described by Bill Gates as one of the "killer apps", this seems somewhate at odds with the community's mission.
Clayton Christian's work on the disk drive industry suggests why: the community listens to itself, not the larger market that it hopes to serve. It's hard to listen to the views of those with whom one as yet has no relationship but it turns out to be essential.
A quick look at the most popular Wine applications shows the problem. Of the 25, only two are not computer games, and both of these (Adobe Photoshop and Canon's Digital Photo Professional) serve one niche market. Together these two applications get only 7% of the community's 'votes'. Microsoft Office 2003 Installer gets only 5 votes (Final Fantasy XI Online Final Fantasy XI has 401) and is so far down the list that it doesn't even show up without filtering.
If the Wine community only works on projects its predominantly gaming community wants, few if any potential Office-under-Wine-under-Linux users will use Wine and thus will not join the community - and there will be no impetus to improve Office running under Wine. We have a vicious circle, ironically exactly the catch 22 situation that the Wine community talks about on it's "Why Wine" page. If Wine is serious about fostering an open source alternative to Microsoft's operating systems, it needs to break this cycle or end up like 3D0, a small footnote in history.
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