RE: Marketing list action: Market Research for GNOME and GNU/Linux

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

I was writing a response to a different post of yours, John, but I saw
this one come in and it answered a lot of the questions I was going to
raise :) So, more comments below...

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 15:16 +1300, John Williams wrote:
> > For example, Mozillas "1 Million downloads in 10 days" was 
> > such a goal.
> > OpenOffice.org's "50% selection rate until 2010" is such a 
> > goal. 
> 
> These are tactical-level goals and as such can only be sensibly defined
> once a strategy has been defined.  What is needed is strategic thinking.
> What I mean is answers to questions like:
> 
> (1)  Who are "we"
> (2)  Why should we give a toss how many GNOME users there are?
> 
> And then
> 
> (3)  Is it better to have as many users as possible, or to focus on a
> select few? (Why?)
> (4)  If it's better to focus, on whom do we focus?  (Why?)
> 
> I see a basic split of possibilities:
> 
> 1.  Focus on existing users in order to make GNOME better for them
> 2.  Focus on non-users in order to induce them to use GNOME

These are absolutely the right questions to ask. I'd suggest, however,
that there are other options for initial focus, who aren't just one of
these two groups:

3. developers who wish to write software for Linux (who may or may not
be linux experts.) A very important part of Microsoft's success has been
their outreach to these independent developers; we probably need to at
least consider seriously marketing to these folks. As we discussed
briefly at the Summit, this probably gets split up into more traditional
third-party ISVs (Real, Adobe, and smaller), open source projects
(Mozilla, OpenOffice, and smaller), and user/hacker/developers who might
become GNOME contributors. Each of those would require slightly
different strategies (though obviously with lots of overlap.)

4. groups which can distribute GNOME. Realistically, unlike firefox or
OOo, installing GNOME is and likely always will be 'experts only'- so it
may be that we get a much bigger bang for the buck by marketing to
distros and large deployments (like Spain, Norway, etc.) 

I'm not sure what implications these other 'markets' have on your
analysis, John, or if you'd considered them and discarded them out of
hand. But I'd love to hear what you think. 

Luis