Re: GNOME's Target Markets

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 18:50:16 +1200
John Williams <jwilliams business otago ac nz> wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 22:25 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > So, let's decide who our customers are (home users, corporates,
> > > distros, ISVs IIRC) and then test our branding materials on some
> > > of them, and see what they think.
> > 
> > Our customers are all these people, but it looks like we want to
> > target a few of them specifically:
> > http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fTargetMarkets
> > (surely we want fewer primary targets?)
> 
> It depends.  The accepted wisdom in marketing is to target the
> smallest number of market segments necessary in order to achieve
> well-defined goals.

A core problem of the 'target market' page is that these elements are
no proper segments but structural elements. This is like shooting an
arrow on a large field, and then to say you hit.

Examples:

 a) Which individual (end) users? Multimedia fans, designers, office
workers? Young, old? etc.

 b) Which enterprises? Automobile, high-tech, medizine, etc? Small ones
or big ones?

 c) Which public sectors? Top, middle or low government? Special areas
of governments, such as Administrative Workflow and Workload
management, Communication and management of public sector documents,
eLearning, Human resource and career development, Hospital management
and healthcare, Real estate management and Geoinformation, or Security,
encryption, PKI, identification and authentication? Any geographical
segments? Europe, South america, asia, etc?

I think, c) points on a very interesting aspect: If we'd pick a real
segment here (maybe based on proper research results), how do we
proceed? We might send them a few letters, saying 'GNOME's great' but
then?

This points to another core problem: The real utility of a desktop
enviroment lies is its market share. It enables one to change
workstadions without the need for re-training. In relation to that,
decision makers (individuals or organizations) only care about content
and the means to process that content.

Thus, applications are our potential means to differentiate. Since the
best opportunity to influence application developement are FOSS ISV's,
what leverage do we have here?


Cheers, 
Claus