Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 7:40 am Post subject:
Glad you're having fun at the conference! Make sure to drink a beer for me (or two...). Hopefully Patrick & I can drag ourselves over to Europe again next year if there's enough people that'd like to get together.
Thanks! Yeah, would be great to have you over next year! But it seems OOoCon is getting a bit demanding, so the conference might end up in Bejing... or maybe Sydney, or the South pole..? Anywhere exotic with an infrastructure...
Hope that you can gather in SoCal sometime this fall, in what we Europeans call the "US branch" of NeoO...
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2007 2:14 am Post subject:
Thanks for the well wishes! Yeah, I need to start tallying hotel stuff for the socal gig and see if we can get a discount... Asia would not surprise me. Between filters for the Chinese standard and historically strong Neo adoption in the Japanese market, I'd not be surprised if in a year or two OOo sees a big shift towards Asia. Right now Europe and America are where the largest Neo bases seem to be based.
Patrick has gone out of his way to really make the multibyte language support in Neo top notch from input methods to ligature and font rendering. Realistically, Neo provides a solution for some Indic and Asian languages where very few solutions exist (Mellel is the first that comes to mind, I'm sure I'm forgetting others). Fact of the matter is that Mac adoption in the Asian market is nowhere near as strong as the US or European market.
That lack of Mac adoption relative to pirated Windows and government mandated Linux will most likely mean that Neo will see less growth in the Asian market than the overall growth of other OOo derivatives that target Windows and Linux. The big unknown is UOF and whether the Chinese government can enforce and mandate a government standard over the entrenched MS standard (due to the fact pirated Office is probably easier to come by than beer nuts in the Chinese market...). Sun's deal with RedFlag already allows them to have a "foot in the door". It allows them to leave open the option of targeting the Chinese government contracting market both through partnering with a local Chinese based company as well as potentially influencing the government ratification of UOF and influence it to not drift so drastically from OpenDocument that neither OOo nor StarOffice are no longer in compliance with the Chinese government standard.
Long story short, the predictions: Mac adoption in Asia will lag Linux, RedFlag will rise (or OOo, depends the format upon which the Chinese government gives its blessing), the US will continue to be the strongest Mac OS X market followed by Europe.
So hmm, perhaps too much of a tangent that it's more of a ranting post? Dunno, but I think that a European outlet for our next dionysian festival is much more likely given that we've just got more friends and users there, and at the end of the day getting folk together to have fun is all that really counts
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Asia would not surprise me. Between filters for the Chinese standard and historically strong Neo adoption in the Japanese market, I'd not be surprised if in a year or two OOo sees a big shift towards Asia. Right now Europe and America are where the largest Neo bases seem to be based.
