Re: Tuxmagazine

[Steve George <slgeorge gmail com>]

Hi Dave,

I can see where the target market page is going.

Conventional wisdom says you should pick a single segment and
concentrate on that one only.

One way to cut down the list is to consider whether other elements of
our community are already marketing to them.  So for example
enterprise customers and public sector are covered by the
distributions - and neither of these markets would use GNOME directly
anyway, they would use a distribution for support etc.

Potential contributors is essentially an enduser early adoptor
segment.  Understand why you see them as potential contributors, which
is important.  I would define them more tightly and look at what they
get from using GNOME - so segment by behaviour/values.

Users
=====
As these are early adoptors the 'power' mantra is a significant
factor.  GNOME pushes simplicity.  So the value should be about being
'powerful enough to do what you want, simple enough to be usable'
similar to the 'simple things are easy, hard things are possible'.

As we specifically want users who are active then you can push the
freedom, community and involvement aspects of the project.

It would be interesting to see what particular qualities of GNOME
actual normal users like!

Developers
=========
There is definitely space for pushing into developers and ISV's. 
Again I think distributions are best placed to go after the commercial
entities.  Consequently, GNOME the project should go after
individuals.  Mono shows the way to build mindshare here with
documentation, tools and buzz.

Again would be interesting to see what real users in this group value





On 5/3/05, Dave Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> Steve George a écrit :
> > This is such a key question, and the answer I think GNOME is giving
> > doesn't make sense to me.
>
> I have concentrated my thoughts on this issue in the Wiki:
> http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/TargetMarkets
>
> Here's my summary:
> "Our core target groups, each requiring a different strategy, are
> potential contributors, linux distributions and the public sector - we
> should concentrate on these, and when we are well developed in these
> areas extend to independent software vendors and enterprise customers -
> concentrating on end users as a target market is a low return on
> investment proposition right now."
>
> If we can agree on this, then we can start building a strategy for those
> groups. Potential contributors => early adopters and geeks, but also
> students, computer literate windows users, and Apple people if Apple
> keeps pissing them off.
>
> > It seems to me that strong influences over GNOME want to develop the
> > desktop towards the user group of tomorrow rather than the existing
> > users of today.  That is to say the focus is on the normal/ordinary
> > 'call-centre' users.  The issue with this is that it's completely
> > ignoring the actual users of today - which are hackers, early adoptors
> > and technical geeks.
>
> Sure - there are forces that want to invest in the platform, and make it
> the obvious choice for writing software on Linux, there are others who
> want to focus on end users, there are others who just want it to be
> cool. Others want it to be rock solid stable. And so on. Everyone
> involved in GNOME has their own idea of what is most important.
>
> I think that we can come to a concensus on our core markets, and
> proclaim those to the world as "The Marketing Team". The developers will
> follow, if we start communicating a coherent message.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave.
>
> --
> David Neary
> bolsh gimp org