Re: GNOME's Target Markets

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

Time to revive this thread again.

On Sun, 2005-07-10 at 18:50 +1200, John Williams wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 22:25 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > Try to explain the issues to us, and suggest definite actions. There are
> > many people here who would love to help to put a plan into motion.
>
> OK, I will try.  It is difficult to do this without access to
> information.  The issues, as I see them from a top-level strategy point
> of view, are this:
>
> 1. Concentrate on the low-hanging fruit.  What can we do with minimum
> effort to get maximum results (number of users)?  Only people working
> with distros, governments, corporates etc. can answer this.  I don't do
> that.
>
> 2. RESEARCH!  Ask users why they do or do not use GNOME.  Include users
> who have seen/used GNOME and also those who have not.  Measure the
> results of marketing actions in the only terms that matter: number of
> users.
>
> 3. Manage the corporate culture.  We cannot simply order people to do
> things.  Motivate the people who actually make GNOME (programmers,
> documenters, usability team, accessibility team, translators, ...) in
> terms they will respond to.  I am a marketing/market research person,
> not an HR person.  (But I think if you treat people as people and not
> pluggable production units you're probably on the right track.  Do unto
> others and all that.)
>
> I find myself repeating myself in many fora.  The bottom line is that
> you can't make rational decisions in the absence of information.  I do
> not have access to the information at the moment.  I am working on it
> though.  

I kind of doubt that you've found meaningful results, and we can't be
blocking on this.

So, are you now ready to push things forward anyway? There seem to be a
few possibilities, but little difference between them. We don't have
accurate numbers and survey results, but that doesn't mean that we don't
know who are customers are, or what product we want to give them. There
are 150-200 sold-on-the-idea people on this list ready to be part of a
grassroots firefox-like campaign.

But it would really help to have our marketing efforts steered by
someone who knows what he's doing, and not amateurs like me. 

Murray

> If you want to help, visit the marketing space on live.gnome.org and
> make some constructive comments.
>
> Hot issues now are being discussed on the gnome-marketing list and the
> #marketing channel on irc.gnome.org.  I try to summarise these
> discussions, particularly at
>
> http://live.gnome.org/CountingUsers
> http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fSurveyUsers
> and
> http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fSurveyDevelopers
>
> See also
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeFeedback
>
> That last link contains a new initiative to gather feedback about GNOME.
> Currently we have none (on those pages).  Please give us some.
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com