Re: Marketing, GNOME 3.0 and subteams

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com> wrote:

I think my main concern is that trying to out-Windows Windows is basically a losing argument: they have a monopoly on the market, and it's locked in effectively by network effects. No matter how much better GNOME is virtually all aspects, it will have severe trouble competing on that ground.

My approach would be to gain a beachhead in a specific but widely-used niche that GNOME can be specifically, but not exclusively, marketed into. Our huge, huge advantage over Windows - again, imho :) - is that GNOME isn't as competitive with third parties / ISVs / others as MS is, and doesn't have the same conflict of interests. That means that GNOME will integrate where Windows won't dare, and look out for the user as #1. Personally, that's how I would look to market it: you have the various DRM examples, even iTunes etc., where software is designed to do things that are not in the interest of the user - which comes down to the entire raison d'etre of free software. Going there is a place that other software (apart from Kde ;) cannot follow, so that would be my approach.

I too think that we should not try to compete with Windows head on. A head to head competition, or drag race, against the biggest competitor is very expensive and drawn out.  We're much better off trying to use different strategies, like finding a niche (like say accessibility) where we can become the dominate player. Or we could provide a whole different alternative - I see this as an opportunity in mobile and netbooks. We can present a completely different interface optimized for the medium. If GNOME 3.0 is different enough, it could do this as well. Or if we were the best desktop for synchronizing across multiple desktops, that'd be something. (That's why the browser is winning the desktop war at the moment.)

Or we could let the Linux distributions have the Linux/Windows fight and we could just establish ourselves as "The choice of Linux Desktop users". According to a book I'm reading[1], that's how Windows won. It was because they were pushing Microsoft Word over WordPerfect and so they established themselves as "the Windows word processor". Supposedly people chose Windows because they wanted Word. They also staged a bunch of contest between WordPerfect and Word at very public venues with lots of WordPerfect users to show that Word was technically better.

Speaking of which, we do very little (if anything?) to advertise GNOME apps. I think users pick operating systems based on apps. They have a task, they pick an app. They don't decide to use Windows or Linux or Mac, they decide to use Photoshop or Gimp or iTunes.

I think just trying to tell Windows users we are better and cheaper is not going to work as a strategy.

Stormy

[1] The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula & Richard Tong https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009S5AIA?tag=stormysblog-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B0009S5AIA&adid=0JC1NND92CNHZAMZP1ZW&