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

[Paul Cooper <pgc openadvantage org>]

On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 08:59 +1300, John Williams wrote:
[snip]
> > 3. developers who wish to write software for Linux (who may or may not
> > be linux experts.) 
[snip]
> > 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. 
> Aw, shucks :-)  Thanks!  No, I hadn't considered them.  I was being a
> myopic user.  I suppose that my position now is: probably forget (4).
> Maybe forget (I mean, do not concentrate on) (3).   
>
> My reasoning for choosing not to focus on (3) is this.  I used to be an
> OS/2 user.  I was driven to OS/2 because I was sick of Windows crashing
> and corrupting/losing my data.  OS/2 was great.  (BTW: and the Workplace
> Shell remains the best GUI I have ever used.)  But there were no
> applications.  I ended up using many Unix/Linux applications that were
> ported to OS/2, just to get my work done.  I ended up using so many
> Linux apps that I thought I'd try Linux.  So I did, and never looked
> back, really.
> 
> Here is my point: OS/2 failed because no-one was developing for OS/2.
> Why not?  There were no users.  IBM, IIRC, was bending over backwards to
> help developers get started.  But they had no motivation.  "Aha!", you
> may say.  "But that was commercial software developers.  FOSS developers
> have different motivations."  I am curious as to whether this is true,
> in the sense that the payoff for _any_ developer is, in a real sense,
> that they are creating something useful that lots of people will use,
> and enjoy using.

Who comes first developers or users? It's a chicken and egg problem I
guess, however you could argue that without (some) developers there
would be no Gnome, and without a strong developer base (remember, this
free software so people come and go) the project won't continue. Clearly
since Gnome is good enough for us to want to promote it we're doing OK
here (but could do better, but that, I think, has do with things other
than marketing, e.g. development tools, developer guides, etc).

<aside>
>From talking to people IBM may have spent alot of money trying to get
people to develop for OS/2, but they didn't make it easy (in terms of
tools, docs, etc)
</aside>

The Linux installed base is already large enough (or important enough)
that many ISV's are already creating Linux versions of their software;

* Real recently switched Realplayer to GTK/Gnome
* Adobe do acroread for linux but they use motif(?) - why don't they use
GTK or just improve Gnome pdf viewer? 
* Vmware use GTK
* Probably more but it's late and I can't think

So I would add this to Luis segmentation to give (in order of likelyhood
to be 'convertable')

* FOSS hackers
* Other FOSS projects
* ISV's already developing Linux / Unix software
* ISV's not developing Linux / Unix software

I think it's vitally important to market to the first 3 to continue to
grow the userbase (which ever userbase we decide is important).

Paul



> Rant, rant, rant.  I am getting a bit off-topic, I think.  
> 
> BTW, Claus mentioned that a possible answer to the "Who is 'we'?"
> question is "The GNOME foundation".  I seem to remember that this was
> discussed in the past, but I forget what the outcome was.
> 
> Ka kite ano,
> 
> John