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

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 04:15:39AM +0200, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> Hm, I might be wrong but I believe this was not John's intention.

Thats might be true.  Maybe I'm just putting my own spin on what he's 
saying.

> However, if we'd like to know what _Linux_ users want to see in GNOME,
> we should consider to differentiate betweeen bugs and feature requests
> in Bugzilla.
>
> And for the slashdot crowd, a web based survey would be sufficient,
> IMHO. Let's scan older OSNews comments, Slashdot, and bugzilla for
> feature requests. There's already a threat in the GNOME forum: "What
> GNOME needs in the future". Organizing this, a little bit of additional
> brainstorming, and we're basically done. :-)

See, you're advocating doing research on the resources/people we have.  I
feel thats okay.  But I think I'd like to see more.  So we have two tracks:

* Maintaining the happiness of the people using the FOSS desktop by adding
  features, bug fixes, documentation, support, and so forth that they want.  
  I think you're advocating this.  

* Growing the user base, and moving beyond what we have towards casual
  and small business owners.  In order to get there, we we need to find
  what they want and what they would like to see.  What would get them
  to switch.  I'm familiar with John's market research idea, but I'm going
  to assume he understands it very well given his background.  But we 
  won't get there without the overall "plan".

When we grow our base, we grow the number of people who switch from
proprietary to free software.  I believe the consensus is thats our main
goal here to convert the unwashed masses to free software.  What does it
take to get there?

> Yes, indeed. This is also my opinion. I was just pointing out that a
> web-based survey would be sufficient for a start.

You're web based survey will only address the needs of current users not
grow the base.  We have to do both.

> > As for the overall goal, thats lacking.  I can write something to
> > debate over tonight onto the wiki and people can try to figure out
> > what works best then.  Generally most people start out with a mission
> > statement; a single unifying sentence that we all rally around and
> > keeps us focused.
> > 
> > sri
> > 
> 
> That would be great step indeed. :-) 

I haven't done it yet.  However, Ian has written some things up in the
wiki as a point of discussion.  Feedback welcome:

http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/

> But I must admit that "goal" meant to me something
> 1.) advanced (or challenging),
> 2.) specific and measurable, and
> 3.) binding.
> 
> 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. "5% of
> all desktop installments worldwide within the next 5 years" might become
> a good goal for a desktop enviroment. ;-)

Goal in this case could mean yearly objectives.  If you have those kind of
goals you need to have data to measure it.  Finding whats relevant might
be an interesting study.

sri