On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 17:08 -0400, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Sascha 'saigkill' Manns
wrote: I think Marketing and PR are very important. But this kind of Marketing i don't like. In Germany we say: "Vergleichende Werbung". That means, that it is not allowed that Mark A says, that Mark B isn't good.
We don't have that here. :-)
My thought is that OpenSource or we (openSUSE) must spend time to more Quality and more Usability. If we are good in that, we have an moneyless Marketing from "mouth to mouth".
Word of mouth is good, excellent in fact, but we also need to do some awareness building.
Yes, more needs to be done for quality and usability, but that's less a marketing function than a testing and QA function. I think we've had that discussion before. :-)
Best,
Zonker --
The question that should be effectively answered in a marketing campaign is... "Why?" And the question is usually asked by an individual when a marketer approaches them and says, "Use our product." What we keep failing to do is understand that average "customer." And yes, even if its free software, they are customers. As buggy as we say Windows may be, people become accustomed to some bugs. People out there aren't saying enmasse "Damn! We really need to find something better than Windows." So if they weren't thinking about replacing Windows, their natural reaction is "Why?" When we answer "Why?" we make the mistake of falling into a technical litany. Average Joe doesn't grasp those technical points. Those issues never even popped into their mind. In fact, I would dare say that all the miscreants of the world that have made a mockery of Windows through virii, worms, etc that most people have experienced actually did MicroSoft a favor. There's so much publicity about this underground culture that people see that culture as the evildoer on their computers, not Microsoft for making it possible for those evildoers. You and I both know Microsoft has to take at least partial blame for this culture, but Average Joe doesn't get that. We need to stop focusing on the technical merits of Free Software and instead focus on the beauty of it. And unfortunately, while the world is screaming "Freedom!" in all aspects of society, the world also doesn't associate "freedom" with "computing." Freedom isn't the message. The message we have to focus on is how this will do the job they want to do. So like Zonker basically says, forget about MS. Focus on us and the good things we do! -- Bryen Yunashko openSUSE Board Member GNOME-A11y Team Member www.bryen.com (Personal Blog) www.planet-a11y.net (Feed aggregator of the Accessibility Community) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org