Some musings on marketing and GNOME 3.0.

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

I was reading slashdot regarding the whole problem with netbooks with Linux having a higher return rate than with windows.  This seems to be an area where we had equal footing and we lost our market share quite fast due to not producing a product that didn't draw consumers to continue stick with platform after purchase.  The problem occurs from the fact that people are familiar with Windows and the platform didn't provide enough of a draw to surmount that familiarity.  We should ask ourselves what we could do as the first line of what customers see when they are in front of their computer screen to keep them there.

When people buy a Mac, they aren't just buying a machine they are buying into a lifestyle (or so they want you to believe. :-) and into an exciting ecosystem of "beautiful things".  We need to do something similar in our approach to GNOME 3.0.  Specifically, we should try to do a number of things:

* Get distros to buy in to a "Marketplace" ala Apple iTunes or iPhone appstore.  A single, well designed site that allows people to get software.  This will include both commercial and free software.  The commercial might sound controversial but what I'm proposing is that people who want to sell their app must still provide source what they charge for is wahtever added value they think they can do.  Distros can still do their software repositories of course but we should favor the market place concept.  I see a big role for PackageKit here in providing the right infrastructure to do this.

* We need more content. Content, should be easily accessible I think.  We need to at least give the illusion that things are happening.  Articles geared towards familiies is a good step.  Howtos for using Gimp to take family photos of your kids and put them as a splash screen or boot screen.  These are jsut examples.  We had talked about youtube channel and there was an objection there because of flash.  We can't start from scratch for this.  We need to create the channel and then learn from youtube and create our own and use our desktop to integrate into that channel.

* Presence in non-technical arenas.  If we have apps like Gourmet Recipe Manager, we should try make a youtube channel (sorry, youtube again, that's where all the people are) the tutorial on how to use it should show up when people search for recipes.  I for one say we should throw out the connotation of the "blessed apps" release and instead say these are the ones that the foundation and marketing team are going to brag about by using google adsense or something like that.  Drive traffic to these applications that follow the rules and are effective and make them more successful.

With GNOME 3.0 we not only have a technical direction, but we have an opportunity to try to gain access to non-traditional geek markets.  Right now I feel that we're just simply speaking to the same set of people while using the overall momentum of open source to get new users.  But these new users I suspect are probably people who are just like us in some way.  We need to grow the market and we need to be serious about it.  We should get our technical contributors to buy into the ideas we come up with.  


Thoughts?

sri