Re: GNOME's Target Markets

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

That is basically exactly what Thomas Keup (GNOME Germany's Marketing
guy) told me. We must be on to something.

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 17:47 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> Quim Gil wrote:
> > En/na Ken VanDine ha escrit:
> >
> > > We shouldn't be specifically targeting
> > > developers any more, we should focus on getting mainstream users.  When
> > > they come the developers follow. 
> >
> > Well, it seems Google thinks the other way round. Many times they have
> > released something new (beta) seducing first the hackers of the free
> > software community, knowing that of they get excited other may come beind.
> >
> > Mozilla has been successful just by following the same way.
> >
> > What's more, even if you are Nike, Sun, Sony, Nokia, BMW or Microsoft in
> > order to hit the mainstream you need a budget out of GNOME's calculations.
>
> I agree with Quim, mostly - GNOME doesn't need "developers" so much as 
> cool. And to be cool, cool people need to use your stuff. And developers 
> are more cool than mainstream users in general.
>
> Calvin Klein is (was?) cool because cool people used it. Cool made 
> popular. Popular meant not cool. People moved on to Prada, Gap, or whatever.
>
> We need momentum users - users who go out, and are proud of the stuff 
> they use, tell people about it, and their blogs get read by millions of 
> people who want to be a little more like them, and so they use it, and 
> like it, and tell people about it, and...
>
> All of a sudden, we're running volunteer funded full page ads in the New 
> York times.
>
> We *probably* have a bigger user base than KDE. Because GNOME comes by 
> default on an awful lot of Linux. But we definitely run second in the 
> momentum users stakes. Any online poll will tell you that. And getting 
> the momentum users is all about being simple, surprising and cool. Being 
> both simple and surprising is hard. Think of the first time you hit 
> Ctrl-F in Firefox 0.7 or 0.8 and you didn't have a windo pop up. I 
> remember what I said to myself - "Cool!" - and then I told a bunch of 
> other people.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave.
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com