Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi Claus,

Claus Schwarm wrote:
> Open Source is useful in a number of ways but there's no need to
> exaggerate its influence, especially not because some projects
> re-invented a known wheel after they threw the existing one away.

Free software has changed the way software is produced - that is a fact.

> As a very simple example: Traditional marketing theory tells you to
> care about the distribution of your product. Firefox cared about it,
> and made it as simple as possible for its potential consumers:
> it offered a binary package taht worked on most distributions IIRC.

New marketing and traditional marketing (in my mind) are not mutually
exclusive. In fact, new marketing is getting back to the source - it is
going from what was called marketing in the 70s and 80s ("eat the shit
we're shovelling you") to what marketing really should be - listening to
your users, telling their stories to yourself and to others, and making
sure that your software is useful.

Firefox, by the way, was not a product of marketing. It was the product
of the will of two people, made possible by the fact that it's free
software. There was no market analysis, someone said "going on the
internet has to be easier than this", and then made the web browser
*they* wanted to use.

> However, the main point is: Neither Open Source nor the Internet removes
> the basic economic and psychological circumstances that determines
> marketing; they merely change the rules slightly.

s/slightly/radically. Do not underestimate the effect of people talking
to each other at a larger scale than ever before.

> And I already wrote that the points made by Doc Searls seem to fit a
> geek2geek market very well.

Isn't that just another way of discounting them as irrelevant?

Dave.

-- 
David Neary
bolsh gimp org