Re: One-word poll

[John Williams <john williams lists gmail com>]

On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 08:14 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 12/2/05, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> > Here's a little unscientific information about what maybe inspires people,
> > or what people might be ready to get behind as a major marketing theme:
> > http://gnomedesktop.org/node/2499.
> >
> > Easy, Friendly, and Quality seem to be leading over my own favourite
> > Beautiful. Does someone with marketing experience know which of these
> > might be  the most productive choice?
Well, I have marketing experience, but only as an academic.  A "practical" marketer knows what has worked for them, in their context, in the past.  As an academic I study what lots of practical marketers have tried and what the results were, and then I try to make meaningful generalisations.  If that's the perspective you are after, perhaps I can help.

Unfortunately the unsufferable academic in me forces me answer your
question with another question: what do you mean by "productive"?  And
productive for whom?  I am not being combatitive here (I hope), merely
seeking clarification.

If you want some "solid facts" I can statistically analyse the data for
you to test whether the differences are "significant".  I personally
don't think that would be helpful in this case, but some people are
impressed by that sort of thing.  So if it would help, send me the data.
It will be a ten minute job for me.


> Beautiful is:
> * completely subjective
As are all the other concepts that are represented by the other words.
You, as an engineer, might come up with some "objective" measure of
quality.  But all that matters is the consumers' perceptions of quality,
not the "real" degree of quality.

> * impossible to back up
What about millions of users commenting on how beautiful it is, a la
OSX?

> * completely irrelevant to many of our important target markets (ISVs,
> distros, big deployments, etc.)
Unless their goals are to sell/deploy software to end users!


> We shouldn't ignore it (it is likely a component of friendly in a
> sophisticated presentation), but honestly it didn't strike me as very
> useful.
I kind of agree here, but not for the reasons you mention above.