Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 08:15:24PM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote:
> in other words, i'd like to see more marketing, and less
> selling/advertising... at least until we know what we have, what
> customers need, and what we could do to offer that to them (not to
> mention finding out who "they" are).

Well said, and I concur.  Of late we've seem to be going in circles,
so you're criticism I think has merit. :-)

I suspect the reason we are doing what we are doing is because
we have no concrete ideas on how to find out what people want.
I can postulate that we find the problem of outreach to be either
more interesting or easier conceptually to deal with than finding
out what our customers want or we think we know what they want.

That question is hard to answer as we do not know what do people
want from their computers.  I suspect for most normal people it's to:

a) do task oriented actions (word processing, homework etc)
b) communications ( collab, IM, VOIP, etc)
c) entertainment (web browsing, blogs, friendster, gaming, photos etc)
d) hop on the latest craze  (itunes etc)

Does our product do all these things?  Yes.  Well?  Open to
debate.  It's a good measure of how much further we have.  But the
technologies that are involved are moving towards maturity in
most areas.  Currently, we  are trying to solve the problem with
trying to reach out to people and say "hey, we fit your objectives,
and we're an alternative!  Please, try us!"  Now the response will be 
more interesting once we have them then we can know more concretely
whether our "product" fits the need.

> well, that's pretty much it.  i'd like to know if i'm the only one
> here concerned about these issues, and even if i am, what's your
> opinion about my rant  :)

I think a well worded critique is probably a good to have once
in awhile to determine our progress and whether we are on the
right track.  Clearly, you do not feel we are making headway.

I'm happy to hear that GNOME Journal is reaching out to people
and is clearly an excellent marketing tool.

sri