On 14/09/10 07:36, Philipp Thomas wrote:
[...] As long as you don't make the error of saying "we're not loosing ground to other distros, we just target different users" that question is important. This whole strategy talking just makes me uneasy as what use is talking about the next five or ten years if you don't know why you're (perceivedly) loosing ground to other distributions. It was suggested on the german list to start by asking people you know (frieds, collegues etc.) why they abandoned openSUSE, stayed with it or stared to use it.
And no, most of them won't join this discussion here because their knowledge of English is small to non existant. Which brings up the next problem in that we leave out lots of users if we force them to use English in order to participate.
As I've started the whole thing on the German mailing list, I should perhaps add a couple of comments. ;-) First of all, Philipp is absolutely right that there are quite a few people on the German mailing list who feel somewhat uncomfortable participating on English-only mailing lists. I assume that there exist similar situations on other local-language mailing lists. It's therefore important that we gather feedback from all the mailing lists (I know, that's quite a bit of work but probably unavoidable to give all openSUSE users a voice). Coming back to what Philipp said, I think he's again absolutely right in saying that first of all we need to better understand the current situation. It doesn't make sense to me to discuss strategies which will hold for the next couple of years without knowing the target. Using the GPS analogy again, it seems as if the strategy team is trying to decide on a direction without knowing the current position. However, we should certainly only decide to head, say, North if we know where we are right now and if we know where our destination is. Otherwise North might be the completely wrong direction. I doubt that a strategy which doesn't go along with addressing the fundamental issues (e.g. losing openSUSE users to other Linux distributions) would do openSUSE any good. It must go hand in hand. I've therefore suggested (and Sebastian and other people on the German mailing list have taken over at that point) that we should first of all look outside of the openSUSE mailing lists and forums to check with people who have deliberately decided to leave openSUSE and use other Linux distributions, or people who have never come to openSUSE in the first place, why they made these decisions. If we managed to get such (honest) information from quite a lot of people in various countries (and I am pretty sure all of us have friends, colleagues or we know other people who fall into above mentioned category), we would hopefully be able to find the strengths and weaknesses of our current openSUSE distribution and also of the openSUSE project itself. Given the language barrier, it would obviously be better to ask people in their native language instead of English. I personally would only decide on targets and strategies once I've obtained the information where we are right now. There must be reasons why Ubuntu and maybe other distributions as well have overtaken openSUSE although openSUSE (or S.u.S.E. as it was called at that time) has existed for over 15 years and, hence, had quite a bit of a head start. Knowing these reasons is crucial. I am not sure whether the proposal of asking around will really work in practice, it's just a suggestion. But if all of us managed to get feedback from, say, 10 people, there would be quite a bit of data that could be analysed. This would then clearly help us to check why openSUSE has lost ground to other distributions. For obvious reasons, we can't gather such information on the openSUSE mailing lists and forums or via homepage etc, we won't find the people we are looking for in this way. The personal approach seems to be the most promising one. Regards, Thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org