On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Graham Lauder graham@theingots.org.nz wrote:
On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 03:23:11 Jean-Daniel Dodin wrote:
Le 17/08/2010 15:12, Graham Lauder a écrit :
Understand me: I don't say we don't have to make our logo/branding better! But It looks like you didn't follow all the SuSE history :-). The lizard was changed many times, and once we changed even the green to take blue. This was not a good choice and we come back to green. Let alone because most other colors are already used by others distros.
Ooh god, I remember the blue, Thank heavens that didn't last long. I also remember some pretty good efforts on behalf of our corporate partner. The NLD9 campaign was a pretty good effort, I could never understand why they abandoned that for the Enterprise version. It had impact, good visual identity, good strong message and oozed sophistication and reliability. The washed out green of the SLE10 campaign was a backward step IMNSHO.
According to "Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities: A case study of Novell and the openSUSE project", the Novell Linux Desktop was dropped because the SUSE brand was better.
"Novell’s first launch of Linux was branded as “Novell Linux Desktop 9”, and was marketed across the world in Novell’s red company colors. According to former SUSE employees, it was a mistake to drop the pre-existing SUSE brand name in the first release: “It was red, all the branding was gone, and we were furious! (...) But then at some point somebody had noticed that SUSE Linux was a very very strong brand.” (interview #23) According to this engineer from the former SUSE company, it seemed as if Novell had underestimated the strength of the SUSE name among the existing customer base and open source community, and therefore chose to keep the SUSE name in its future Linux releases. The next (and current) enterprise release was named “SUSE Linux Enterprise”."
(p. 58)
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Community_references
The point is I do have a bit of a handle on the history and I would have liked to participate earlier but circumstances didn't really allow, so the frustration has built over time. I have been out there at the coal face and I get frustrated when I attend conferences or events and I'm a single face in the crowd of Ubuntu guys
[...]
I've already stated that we need to do the basic ground work. Define our target market and brand accordingly
The market target definition is on-going work with the Strategy discussion, although I'm pretty sure the openSUSE Project won't target the same market as Ubuntu. The green color and chamelon logo of the openSUSE brand is already defined and well established. Changing it would be a major mistake. And it is probably far better than what you expect.
Regards,
R.
/Save the Planet. Use openSUSE.