Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
On Tuesday 05 February 2008 5:40:53 pm Doug McGarrett wrote:
Well, Zonker, I think that the consensus here on the list is that Novell should make boxed editions with manuals available for purchase, and for best effect, (IMHO) should make them available at the same time as the on-line release--before everyone finds out how crappy the release really is. I see that there was some discussion about reliability vs. bleeding edge, and I don't know what the consensus of that was, but I'm running 9.3, if that tells you anything. (And I have 10.0, which I bought.) If Novell will sell SuSE with some legal drivers which are now left out,and sell it thru Staples and/or bookstores, it would really help to spread the product around, which I assume they would like to do. And might even make some money-- who's paying for all this freeware, anyway?
A couple of thoughts on this... one, I am using 10.3 right now, and I don't find it to be "crappy" at all.
Quality has definitely declined since 9.3. 10.0 and 10.1 have both been disappointments for me. Too much stuff that used to work flawlessly became problematic.
I think some other people have covered some of the problems with selling boxed product later in another thread, but I can just add -- when I worked with Linux Mall, it was really difficult to do well selling boxed copies of distributions, because of the short release cycle and such. And that was when more people bought boxed copies due to sparse availability of broadband -- now, even though more people are using Linux, fewer people want to buy the box set.
BTW, I'm not in favor of .pdf "manuals." I don't really want to burn a ream of printer paper and a half cup of toner just to have the manual in my lap in my armchair. That strikes me as awfully inefficient, not to mention expensive.
I wonder if a good compromise might be for openSUSE to put the PDFs on a service like Lulu.com and allow people to buy the manual through Lulu. Since they operate on a print-on-demand system, that might be a good way to go.
That's good *ONLY* if the users are AWARE of it. Don't depend on word-of-mouth, or "community knowledge", because a lot of new users never get that kind of information for a long time. There needs to be EXPLICIT instructions, placed perhaps in ~root, and DISPLAYED when the admin logs-in (at least for the first time) so that EVERYONE knows it exists. Burying facts like this someplace in the /share/docs hierarchy, and thinking new users will just magically find it there is a pipe dream.
It will be interesting to see what effect you have on Novell, and I wish you the best of luck with that endeavor.
Thanks!
Blessed are the peacemakers ... for they shall be shot at from both sides.
:-) Awesome sig.
Best,
Zonker
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