Market segmentation

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi,

I think it makes sense to use a seperate topic.

On Mon, 9 May 2005 17:58:49 +0100
Steve George <slgeorge gmail com> wrote:

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

Ehm, sorry to say, but No. ;)

Conventional wisdom says you should pick the segments that are the most
profitable.

Expressed more precisely in economists language: Pick segments where you
can make a profit at all (because economists have a wider definition of
costs that includes the 'average' profit of investments).

Now, we don't care about profits. Thus, our central question is: What do
we want people in a segment to do if we find segments? A too short
answer (unfortunalty) is:

== End-Users ==

 * Use (*ix with) the GNOME desktop.
 * Contribute (what?)

== Developers ==

 * Use (*ix with) the GNOME development platform.
 * Contribute (what?)

== Distros ==

 * Distribute the GNOME desktop (as default?).
 * Distribute the GNOME development platform.
 * Distribute GNOME apps of third-party developers
 * Contribute (what?)


Apart from this issue, our current market 'segmentation' is too broad.
Usual requirements are explained here:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_segment

and our description on TargetMarkets don't meet any of them. However,
some of them are less relevant to us: We can't do a proper cluster
analysis.

So, let's just look at two of them: Identification (who are they?),
and Acessability (how can we reach them?).

> From our discussion so far, the only attributes we found are:

== End-users (private) ==

 * probably older than 25 (young people tweak, older got over it and
   want a desktop working).
 * Contact via Web pages, print journals (PR), individual advocacy

== End-users (institutional) ==

 * currently we distiguish Public sector and Enterprise users.
 * Contact via conferences, and individual advocacy

== Developers (private) ==

 * They care about ease of development, and their own requirements
   (scratch my own itch), maybe end-users.
 * Contact via ?, and individual advocacy

== Developers (commercial) ==

 * ISV's care about profit, and thus about end-users (sales), and
   costs.
 * Contact via ?, and individual advocacy

== Distros (Community) ==

 * they care about themselves, in a 'scratch my own itch' way, and their
   users.
 * Contact via ?, and individual advocacy

== Distros (Commercial) ==

 * They care about profit, and thus end-users (sales), and costs.
 * Contact via ?, and individual advocacy


Contributions, remarks, comments, discussion, etc. welcome. Maybe we can
agree on a common view on the situation.


Cheers, 
Claus