Re: Tuxmagazine

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi Steve,

Steve George a écrit :
> This is such a key question, and the answer I think GNOME is giving
> doesn't make sense to me.

I have concentrated my thoughts on this issue in the Wiki:
http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/TargetMarkets

Here's my summary:
"Our core target groups, each requiring a different strategy, are 
potential contributors, linux distributions and the public sector - we 
should concentrate on these, and when we are well developed in these 
areas extend to independent software vendors and enterprise customers - 
concentrating on end users as a target market is a low return on 
investment proposition right now."

If we can agree on this, then we can start building a strategy for those 
groups. Potential contributors => early adopters and geeks, but also 
students, computer literate windows users, and Apple people if Apple 
keeps pissing them off.

> It seems to me that strong influences over GNOME want to develop the
> desktop towards the user group of tomorrow rather than the existing
> users of today.  That is to say the focus is on the normal/ordinary
> 'call-centre' users.  The issue with this is that it's completely
> ignoring the actual users of today - which are hackers, early adoptors
> and technical geeks.

Sure - there are forces that want to invest in the platform, and make it 
the obvious choice for writing software on Linux, there are others who 
want to focus on end users, there are others who just want it to be 
cool. Others want it to be rock solid stable. And so on. Everyone 
involved in GNOME has their own idea of what is most important.

I think that we can come to a concensus on our core markets, and 
proclaim those to the world as "The Marketing Team". The developers will 
follow, if we start communicating a coherent message.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org