Re: The "What is GNOME?" Answer

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:47:53 +1300
John Williams <jwilliams business otago ac nz> wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 20:59 +0100, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> 
> > "GNOME - computing made easy"
> 
> This smacks of "marketing as lies" to me.  It exemplifies the reason why
> people hate marketers: they say things that are either (a) not true; or
> (b) essentially meaningless. 

Pardon? This is the official slogan.

However, your critic exemplifies why "engineers" hate marketers: They believe
everything should be a man page and everybody is supposed to read them.

That's simply wrong. Empirical examples can be found on all mailing list in
the world: People don't read man pages! (...at least, completely. :D )

And, by the way, the given slogan is nearly true. Read is as "Linux made easy"
and there you have the GNOME USP. If you don't believe this, have a look in the
users forum. There's a threat, why people use GNOME. The HIG was mentioned
rather often.

The HIG is the main reason for people to choose GNOME. If you read the recent 
rant of ESR, you got a hint why people desperatly believe in the HIG.

But _if_ GNOME would change the slogan into "Linux made easy" to be more thruthful,
engineers from all over the world would start ranting because they are ignorant to
cognitive restraints and take these sentences as part of a man page.

> 
> Sure, GNOME makes computing easy in some sense, but no more so than
> Windows or Mac OS (or others).
> 

That's completly irrelevant. To express this in engineers talk:  you like to 
optimize recollection of the USP within the contraint of the _very_ restricted
attention of people.

There's no other way to restrict yourself to a few words, and thus you get
ambigous. Period. But this holds for every competitor!

Best example of the restriction is exemplified by Jeff in this threat: I mentioned
the difference between GNOME as a product and the GNOME community in my very first
mail to his question (webhackers list). But the email was obviously too long so he
didn't reflect this point until you brought it up a second time.

Another example for engineers: The threat is now three days old and is about changing
a sentence which will hardly read by anyone on the "about" page. Additionally, we
don't even utilize the few miliseconds attention to support the basic USP. That's
inefficiency at its best.

Please, buy a good book about cognitive psychology before you next question basic
marketing techniques. I would do the same if I would try to question your code.


Regards, 

Claus

P.S.: People don't like car salers, not marketeers, btw! ;-D