Re: evangelist users- the other key note from LCA marketing BOF

[Marcus Bauer <mbauer tiscali fr>]

Some major flaws in current gnome marketing:

Gnome does not really promote its ease of use. Havoc's README that comes
with the metacity package simply needs to be polished up into a
press-printable form (shorter, less rant, less technical).
nautilus-cd-burner is hidden away as it obviously can't compete with k3b
but in fact it's the other way round: k3b can't compete with
nautilus-cd-burner in terms of ease of use. It's just three weeks ago
that I demonstrated this fact to somebody and he was completly stunned
how simple it is to make backups of his data simply by drag and drop.

KDE embraces Gnome apps where there is no equivalent (gimp,inkscape) as
well as technology (gnome-volume-manager). These apps are often not
perceived as Gnome apps from KDE users. So one just needs to tell
them ;-)

Knoppix was one of the major precursors for KDE and there is still no
real competition. It was spread out hundreds of thousands of copies with
PC-Magazines and the like, being the first contact with linux for many
people. Imho konppix is the absolut no.1 hit in KDE marketing. There are
even books now about knoppix.

The Gnome website is - what? It exists. But from a marketing point of
view it is not much. The navigation is sub optimal. And the layout is
sub optimal. Some good information is now on gnomefiles but unless you
know what you are looking for it is far from perfect.




On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 08:47 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> A dump of my notes (slightly expanded) from the discussion on
> 'Evangelist Users' at the LCA marketing BOF. In a nutshell, the
> discussion was about users who go out and evangelize GNOME- how have
> firefox/KDE been so succesful at this, why are we not doing so hot,
> how can we (should we?) etc. My notes, with my editorial comments as
> Ed.:
> 
> MozillaOrg does a good job of this, see spreadfirefox.com
> 
> jeff: 'hemorrhaging users' because we haven't reached out to the early
> adopters, etc.- not leveraging community to do our marketing for us.
> (Ed.: I'm not sure we're actually hemorrhaghing users, as we have no
> actual numbers on this, but we're certainly not leveraging the users
> we have for this.)
> 
> mozilla used to have an active HTML correctness evangelism team, do we
> need a 'media correctness team' to go out to bad (FUD-y?)
> articles/media and show them how great gnome is/or research why they
> didn't like it?
> 
> need to hype our user forums more? how did UbuntuCom get such great,
> friendly forum?
> 
> how do we make gnome 1337 without compromising our 'core values'?
> (flip side: os/x is not particularly 1337, or not compromised, but
> obviously it gets evangelized- partially because of the
> depth/flexibility- easy for newbies, powerful for experts)
> 
> alternately: how do we make gnome more fun? maybe better question than
> making ourselves more 1337?
> 
> get a superstar? we as developers need to be more public, more
> unabashed about our endorsements- havoc, miguel? what about kernel
> people? others?