"expected gains in market share"

[Cam]

Eric,

Do you really think that a substantial population of adopters are ready 
and waiting but held back because mp3 isn't in Fedora?

I think that's nonsense. If you rank potential users by ability, the 
vast majority will not use Fedora because they can't buy a machine with 
it pre-installed; others will not use Fedora because they aren't 
confident about partitioning disks or shrinking NTFS partitions.

I'm not aware of any vendor that ships Fedora (and IMHO it's not likely 
as a vendor would chose something which would be supported for longer 
than a given Fedora release). Given that other users will have to follow 
technical instructions to burn CDs or perform a network install, they 
will have a level of ability where they are more than capable of getting 
mp3 support through the established methods.

I think there are better goals that would increase adoption:

1. marketing: a 'sampler' live-CD or VMWare image; web based tutorials 
and demos with video showing features
2. technical improvements: provide email notification through 
thunderbird; provide desktop integration for firefox; any other workflow 
  related improvements
3. better documentation from a user's perspective - how to do task X 
instead of how to use 'Banshee' (or any other obscurely named app)
4. bling, because people will make the effort to see it, even if it's 
not a productivity enhancement; it also gets you noticed in print. As a 
bleeding edge distro Fedora is well placed to make the most of this.

I think any of the above would do more to increase adoption than merely 
including mp3 support.

-Cam

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                                                                      <--
camilo at mesias.co.uk