Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?

[Thilo Pfennig <tpfennig gmail com>]

Hi,

to  " Santiago Roza": I absolutely subscribe what you write. Actually
I was writing a similar criticism..


about "market segmentation.odt":
I do not think that the approach is the right one, that is taken in
there. This is a very product orientated model. And I think that is
should nit be the point to persuade people to use GNOME. He cited a
passage of John Williams and I think that was a good citation/point.

I think we CAN choose what kind of users we target. What we choose now
can be different in one or two years. I think we should know why we
target what audience! And thinking that a target group is good is not
enough. There should be more hard facts.

I do not aggree on not targeting the mainstream desktop is a good
idea! Dave NEary wrote:
"Because the mainstream will adopt Linux, not  GNOME, and GNOME will
just come along for the ride (see: Distributions and third party
developers). And the mainstream isn't yet adopting linux on the
desktop, so focussing energy there is a waste of our time."

I don't think that this must be the case. GNOME clearly has to develop
in other areas like ASP applications. We should not just follow the
path of WIndows and say that we can not follow.

I am absolutely convinced that a GNOME desktop can be competitive in
the mainstream market.

My impression is that GNOME really does not want to be "loved". There
is too much scepticism: On the one hand there are the hackers that
know why they use GNOME, also the early adopters. And they do often
communicate badly to the mainstream.

If you look at the Ubuntu marketing you can learn that they just claim
to be more human than other distros and gain a great new market share
with it. This was ingenious!

I also think that there is too less thought about how people actually
will install there GNOME. I think that "buy your distro, stupid" is
not a very good approach. Convincing ISVs is a nice idea and it will
also pay off.

What I would suggest is that there is also a way for a single user or
a small company
 to test GNOME and also to install it very easy. Rigth now this is
against our policy and I think this is wrong.

I have the feeling we really want GNOME to be mainly for hackers and
early adopters in the future. Linspire showed with Wal-Mart that Linux
does not have to be in a niche market.

People have some needs that they want to have solved. And GNOME can
contribute, although I also think we have some more lessons to learn
and our products have to be much better. Some products are very good
and we should show them more prominent. Besides the applications we
shuld show how GNOME is solving every day problems (by this I did not
say anything about the target market)


Thilo

--
http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/