Re: evangelist users- the other key note from LCA marketing BOF

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 5/19/05, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> On 5/19/05, Marcus Bauer <mbauer tiscali fr> wrote:
> > Some major flaws in current gnome marketing:
>
> There are many :)
>
> > Gnome does not really promote its ease of use.
>
> We don't very effectively, you're right. When I promote it at LWE
> (because usability is practically the /only/ thing I talk about at
> conferences or when I sell GNOME in other contexts, like press
> releases), people's jaws drop, as you saw when you pointed out n-c-b.
> We should be doing more, though I'm not sure how to structure the
> website and other materials to do that better.

BTW: 
http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fTalkingPoints

is sort of the start of an outline of 'what are the things GNOME
should talk about when we talk about GNOME'. Some of this discussion
might do well to be recorded there. I'm not sure how to capture it in
document form exactly, but I could easily go through that list and
prioritize with the following comments:

    * EaseOfUse - We help users to achieve their goals. [Luis: sold
well, people get really excited about that. OS/X and Google help here.
And you can talk about it for hours, and beat KDE over the head with
it- the list of instances where you can say 'look how complex KDE is,
look how simple we are' is very, very long. Honestly, if they ever
figure this one out, GNOME loses a lot of our rationale for being
around, which would be fine, as we'd have a usable desktop either
way.]

    * ExistingGnomeDeployments [Luis: People care a lot, shows that
Real People are using this. Ditto for partners- it is sad, but
Novell/Sun/RedHat support matters to people.]

    * GPL/LGPL (we should compile a list of
/PracticalBenefitsOfFreeSoftware) [Luis: no one cares /that/ much,
except ISVs who hear LGPL opposed to QT/GPL and are happy. LGPL is
likely why we 'won' Eclipse/Adobe, though I don't know that for a
fact.]

    * OpenStandards - no vendor lock-in. [Luis: no one really cares,
except in some cases ISVs.]

    * ReliableReleaseSchedule - we say what we'll do and when we'll do
it, and then we do it. [Luis: people are impressed when they hear
this, but only certain classes care.]

    * Localization - We support more languages, and we allow them to
support themselves. [Luis: once people are assured it supports their
language, they don't care. If they are in a minority language,
assuring them that it does or can support their language is very
exciting to them.]

    *  BinaryCompatibility between releases - a stable foundation on
which to develop applications. [Luis: ISVs care, no one else does.]