[cw-discuss] Crossover Games?

[Jeremy White]

Chuck Harris wrote:
> I wonder if I am the only one that wishes you would stop
> spending time on games, and put the effort on office type
> applications?  Perhaps getting IE6 to work under windows 2000?

You're very much not the only one who feels that way; I get
that comment a fair amount.

And you've expressed it exactly the same way everyone else
that makes that comment does:

"Why are you working on this other thing
I don't care about?  You should work on the one thing *I* want."

And while I'm teasing you a bit there, I do know that we
can make mistakes in judgement, so it's very important to me
that we listen carefully.  Chuck, I hope you would agree that I
have responded seriously to both your private and public comments
on this subject.

I also try to be as transparent about my decision process as I can be;
the idea behind being an open source programmer is that others catch
your mistakes.  I'm cheerful to extend that philosophy to my business
decisions as much as I can as well.

> 
> Trying to be everything to everyone only results in disappointment.

Sure; that's a guideline we hold as well, although we express it
in the inverse:  we need to rally around a specific message of something
we do well.

Candidly, this issue is the hardest one for me to wrestle with.
We have very limited technical resources, and work on Wine is
very hard and very slow.  So deciding how best to spend those
resources is something I struggle with a great deal.

Take Microsoft Office, for example.  We built our product line around
support for MS Office.  Early incarnations of CrossOver essentially did
nothing but Microsoft Office.  But on the Mac, it's largely unneeded.  So half
of our market doesn't need it.  And on Linux, interest in MS Office has
been waning, year over year.  OpenOffice is getting better, and there
are enough alternatives that it isn't as compelling.  And, thanks to our
work, free Wine runs MS Office increasingly well, so folks don't need
to buy CrossOver to run it.  So if we focused
on nothing but Microsoft Office, we'd be out of business right now.

Hence, one of the key things we are interested in with CrossOver Games
is that it gives us a point of focus (most games are largely similar,
making the technical problem straight forward) that we can rally around.
We can work to make games work well (and they work remarkably well due
to the hard work of a lot of great people) and bring that message forward.

The regular CrossOver can then focus more specifically on keeping productivity
applications stable and reliable, and it's not diluted by trying to run games or Foozleware.
(And we hope to have Office 2007 support available shortly, Peter :-/)

Cheers,

Jeremy