Re: Marketing, GNOME 3.0 and subteams

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 17:42 +0200, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback. A few remarks:
> 
> Benefits:
> =========
> 
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>
> wrote:
> 
> > I think we need to think about why we want end-users to use GNOME
> 3.0. Or why we want them
> > to use GNOME at all. Those are the messages we can market. (And we
> know these, freedom, 
> > accessibility, usability, etc.)
> 
> To be frank, these are no benefits. For a potential user, it begs the
> question: "Why should I care whether GNOME3 is "free", "accessible" or
> "usable"? Millions of people use other desktops that are supposed to
> be "less free", "less accessible" or "less usable" and yet these
> millions of people do just fine. (And speaking freely, these can't
> stand against the other important feature of a desktop: ubiquity.)
> 
> From an economist's point of view, these are "experience qualities":
> One has to "buy" the product before one is able to confirm these
> qualities. Of course, GNOME is not bought but we need people to invest
> their time to install it somehow.
> 
> In other words: People need to install GNOME to be able to understand
> how "usability" benefits them. But they are not motivated to install
> GNOME because they don't understand how "usability" benefits them.
> It's basically a catch-22 situation.
> 
> Thus, I'd recommend to communicate real benefits, and link these
> benefits to the features by proofs.

This is not an either/or scenario.  Freedom, for instance,
is very core to Gnome.  We should never stop communicating
that.  It's who we are.  We should absolutely try to show
people real stuff that gets them excited, but that doesn't
mean we drop the values.

Furthermore, I'd argue that accessibility is more than just
some feature people can do without.  It might not matter to
you or me as much, but to the people who need it, it's the
difference between being able to use the system and not.
They do not "do just fine" with non-accessible systems.

--
Shaun