Re: Marketing, GNOME 3.0 and subteams



Hey Dave,

Dave Neary wrote:
Alex Hudson wrote:
While I agree with the sentiment, the situation is that for most people
Windows is gratis.

Yes, but it's not Free.

I agree, freedom is a hard concept to sell. Do we want to compare Linux
to the American civil rights movement in the 60s? Solidarity in Poland
in the 80s? The fight against Apartheid in South Africa? Perhaps 1984 or
Brave New World, the police state in the US and UK?

To be honest, even if there was a way to promote that image without the 'silly' as you later discussed, I'm not sure it's really that effective a message anyway.

If someone uses a piece of free software instead of proprietary, what's the main immediate benefit to them? Really, there isn't one - the value of software freedom is a bit further down the road ("you won't be forced to do <x> in the future" or that kind of thing) and what we're effectively trying to promote is something more akin to a promise or an insurance policy.

Trying to market something on "jam tomorrow" is hard. I think it would be especially hard when, for the most people, the non-free aspects of proprietary software generally don't bother them. People don't feel digitally oppressed, and no marketing campaign that we could launch is going to bring them to any point of recognition imho. If you ask a selection of people what problems they have with their computer, I would be amazed if any issues that were more than tangentially related to freedom came up.

We *must* find a way to frame the debate in terms of freedom, choice,
community. Those *are* our selling points. As Claus said, to the end
user, there is very little technical merit to choosing Linux over
Windows. So we have to frame the debate differently.

Well, I agree and disagree with that. I agree that a marketing message has to be framed on the strengths, and I think you're correctly identifying those. But I also think it has to be framed in a way that users will recognise the value easily without having to be "educated" in some way.

Let me give you an example. Software distribution in the free software world works somewhat differently to the proprietary world, as we know. You click on PackageKit or whatever, and you can go find apps, download it and install it.

Ok, it's enabled by freedom, but it's a technical feature which delivers immediate and obvious value to the end user. And I'm extremely confident that it's a message which would work well because I see the exact same message on my TV; except it's Apple spending millions showcasing their iPhone app store and how wonderful it is.

And actually, if we think about this, it's an area we should be strong in but we're still being whipped by the proprietary boys. Apple have this whole third-party apps ecosystem. Google/Android have the same thing in development, WME has it, etc. etc. GNOME is really sorely lacking in that area, we don't have anything like the same kind of independent software authors contributing little apps.

However, that said, I don't think GNOME is marketable as mainstream
software - mainly because, it's not Windows. I don't think marketing
GNOME as a Windows competitor per se is a winning strategy either :)

You're allowing the game to be defined by the past, not the future.

Windows is a general purpose desktop operating system.

Competing against Windows as a general purpose operating system is a
losing proposition.

However, competing against Windows as a light, adaptible operating
system, with variants suitable for smaller form factors, could work.

Well, that was really what I was getting at. These variants aren't really competing with Windows; they're competing with the specific apps running on those devices, particularly the embedded stuff.

In fact, they make up a market that's pretty classic in terms of market share versus mind share. Loads of people have TomTom. Only a minority know they're running Linux. It could be Windows under there; they don't care. Same can probably be said of phones, netbooks, digital TV, etc.

For me, marketing has to be about mind share, not market share.

Cheers,

Alex.



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