[Article] WINE and the importance of application compatibility

[Brian Vincent]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Steven Edwards <winehacker at gmail.com>wrote:

> doubt it. The situation I face with my day job, is that we can't even
> get support for certain applications in VMware. As soon as we say "we
> have a virtualized cluster" they balk. And we are talking about
> situations where we are spending millions of dollars on our software
> and are going to be supporting it in house. With that sort of
> reaction, it leads me to think we are never going to make major
> inroads except for the end users at home or the people buying Linux
> netbooks.


Kind of a tangent.. but I've thought for a long time Google did something
really right with Picasa: they packaged a canned version of Wine alongside a
canned version of their app.  These days, hard drives space is cheap and no
one notices an extra 20MB of Wine libraries with a set up program.

Which leads me to my $.02: I wonder if there's a sweet spot for Wine
adoption somewhere in the middle-tier of the software application popularity
contest.  For instance, rather than going after Photoshop or Photoshop
Elements (which is still a noble goal), what about approaching Paintshop Pro
about their Photo x2 product.  Or, what about approaching the ISV that
created Home Depot's freeware CD for laying out your home design?
Specifically, I think there's a lot of proprietary applications without a
good alternative (think more of the Home Depot or Sysco's "Rio", etc ).  I
think there's $$$ to be made for someone who can QA apps with Wine, fix
minor issues, package Wine alongside the app, and finally deliver the
product to an ISV.  I don't think this is something the Wine community
itself would be interested in, but I suspect there's someone in the Wine
community who's capable of pulling it off.  I think there's a lot of angles
to the idea that could work.

-Brian
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