[Promotion] Counting Free Desktop Users

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Saturday 28 January 2006 23:56, John Williams wrote:
> After GNOME.conf.au my interest in getting "hard" data on the number of
> users of GNOME and KDE worldwide.  This has been discussed in the GNOME
> context (http://live.gnome.org/CountingUsers) but seems to have died.
> Have the KDE people had similar discussions?

Let's say "we're aware of the necessity of research based on numbers" and want 
to work on that. :-)

> It strikes me that this would be an area where we can collaborate, both
> on implementation and analysis of results.  I am a market research guy,
> so I am happy to do the analysis, but any code that I write for the
> implementation side would be almost guaranteed to be crap.

Great! My stance would be to formulate one or more research questions, i.e. 
what do we want to get to know, operationalise them, put together a catalogue 
of questions and choose a way to have them answered.

Personally, I'd be interested in the mere number of free desktops as a 
beginning. It's quite hard to work on marketing as long as you don't even 
know the current situation. Then, it would be interesting which parts really 
need to be improved for the free desktop to be able to enter the market of 
early adopters, so which (perceived) barriers are holding us from more market 
share. But there's a lot more.

A tricky bit is how do we get the results, survey comes to mind, but choosing 
a representative sample can be quite hard, and gathering data is also quite a 
big task.

> Please share your thoughts about all this.
-- 
sebas

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