Re: Marketing, GNOME 3.0 and subteams

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

Thanks for the feedback. A few remarks:

Benefits:
=========

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org> wrote:

> I think we need to think about why we want end-users to use GNOME 3.0. Or why we want them
> to use GNOME at all. Those are the messages we can market. (And we know these, freedom, 
> accessibility, usability, etc.)

To be frank, these are no benefits. For a potential user, it begs the question: "Why should I care whether GNOME3 is "free", "accessible" or "usable"? Millions of people use other desktops that are supposed to be "less free", "less accessible" or "less usable" and yet these millions of people do just fine. (And speaking freely, these can't stand against the other important feature of a desktop: ubiquity.)

From an economist's point of view, these are "experience qualities": One has to "buy" the product before one is able to confirm these qualities. Of course, GNOME is not bought but we need people to invest their time to install it somehow.

In other words: People need to install GNOME to be able to understand how "usability" benefits them. But they are not motivated to install GNOME because they don't understand how "usability" benefits them. It's basically a catch-22 situation.

Thus, I'd recommend to communicate real benefits, and link these benefits to the features by proofs.

Distributions
=============

> (FYI, I asked all the advisory board members to ask their marketing folks to join this list. I haven't 
> heard back from anyone ...)

Well, that's not much of a surprise for me. There's no benefit for marketing guys to join the list. It would be just more work.


Exclusive Media Partnership
===========================

> I think that's a great idea if it sits well with the open source nature of our product.

Sure it does. Why would it not? The exclusivity is about certain information, not about code.

Example: Let's say, the usability team is able to make a small study, say 20 participants. Maybe, it'll show that using GNOME Shell reduces the time needed to complete a set of common desktop tasks by, say, 20 percent.

There's nothing about Open Source that requires us to make this information available to everyone at the same time. We could just push it to one journalist at a major IT journal. (Or a set of journalists with different languages.) When such a story is published, the journal is likely to get social media backlinks, better search engine ranking, and reputation. That's a benefit for them.


Budget
======

I forgot to mention it in the previous mail: It's probably also necessary to have a budget. In fact, it's the most important point. We may need money to print posters and flyers and sent them all around the world. When looking at the glacial speed of the GNOME Web Revamp, we may also need money to rent an outside server. Etc. Of course, this depends on how much hype the GNOME community wants about v3.


Best Regards,
Claus


P.S.: On a side note, the argument about the benefits of certain changes in GNOME3 already started:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8fxtw/not_content_with_kde_being_the_crappiest_de_gnome/