On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 14:40 -0700, R. Tyler Ballance wrote:
This morning, prior to the meeting in #opensuse-marketing, Bryen, Matt, some others and myself were talking about some of openSUSE's messaging; a discussion I feel should be taken onto the mailing list :)
The original question I posed was:
Who is openSUSE competing with?
Actually this is the ongoing discussion going on with the strategy proposals as seen on the -project mailing list. Both AJ and I are on the Strategy Team and the outcome of what strategy is decided upon will greatly influence the direction of our Marketing Team. However, even with a decided upon Strategy, we, in Marketing are still tasked with rapidly responding to market changes and identifying new areas and markets to go after. Therefore, we will follow the wisdom of the strategy but can go beyond that depending on what opportunities arise before us.
To which Bryen replied "Ubuntu for now", in my humblest of opinions, I feel this is slightly off-mark. It relies on Ubuntu converting Windows and Mac OS X users and then somehow wooing their users away. Reviewing Ubuntu's messaging, an end-user would likely never realize: what Linux is or that there are different flavors of Linux out there!
Let me clarify that. The context of the question was, as I interpreted it, about whether we target new users to Linux or new users from other distros, and the names presented forth were Ubuntu, Windows and OSX. In that context, I referred to Ubuntu as our competitor, but I used Ubuntu generically. In other words, currently our competition is existing users of Linux that may not currently be using openSUSE. And therefore, Ubuntu == any Linux distro out there. Do i want to grow our efforts to target new users beyond existing Linux users? Absolutely! But even that is a very broad statement and we have to take the time to figure out what types of new users to target. Power users? non-techie users? Corporate users? Government users? The possibilities are endless and if we just simply say non-Linux new users, we shoot ourselves in the foot by going for big game without identifying specific targets. Those specific targets will be better clarified once we have our final strategy in place for the Project.
Digging into Ubuntu's messaging they *never* refer to Linux as far as I can tell, but rather pitch the "ease of computing", etc. Additionally, Ubuntu really stresses a GNOME-centric desktop, which means one of openSUSE's core strength's (a great KDE setup) is moot.
Not referring to Linux is a disservice in my opinion. Let me relate a story I heard from a fellow marketeer in the Fedora circle a few months ago. He showed his Fedora desktop to a person who never really saw Linux before, but had heard plenty of the name "Ubuntu." When that person saw it, he said "Yeah, that's Ubuntu!" The Fedora dude kept trying to say, No, its Fedora. But no matter how much he said it, this person was set in stone to call any Linux installation as "Ubuntu." Ubuntu did an awesome job of achieving mindshare. But doing that at the cost of dropping Linux from the name is fundamentally flawed in my opinion. We, the distros, are all competitors to each other yes, but we are also all collaborators. It's a wonderfully cool thing about FOSS where we work together even on opposite sides. To not recognize the contributions of the Linux community as a whole in order to promote your distro is a philosophy I personally can never endorse. With regards to GNOME and KDE... It is indeed an advantage of openSUSE that it does KDE so well and we should definitely promote this. But rather than just promote KDE, I think our bigger advantage is that we are a multi-Desktop Environment distro. We provide KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and now LXDE. This puts us at an advantage because now you can leverage the benefits of different desktops together in the same experience. You can use KDE and still use some GNOME apps that you find better, and vice versa. This is a message we should be including to the world.
I don't claim to have answers or any good suggestions, I'm just curious about our current marketing messaging and how it addresses non-openSUSE users.
In some ways we're in a building year. The marketing team as a formal team hasn't been in existence that long. Zonker did a lot of work to build up the team, but unfortunately, we became somewhat complacent and left him to do a lot of the grunt work. As a result, most of us didn't take the time to think about the message, because Zonker was doing a great job promoting us no matter what the message was. Now, we're here and the goal for this year is to really give the community the chance to drive the marketing efforts. This is why I am very proud of how we did in the 11.3 launch, simply because people stepped up. Results were not the most important goal for me, team building was, and we did pretty well I think. As a consequence of this year's building, people are learning to understand... What is a message? What is the message supposed to do? What are the ways we deliver that message? While AJ and I have encouraged the discussion and even given input to crafting a message, we also want to give the community the chance to formulate that message in its own time. We have no intention of dictating that message to the team outright. So I don't expect our message to be crystal clear in the very near future, what I expect is that the team will take the time to assess themselves and how they can best contribute and how they can best build themselves as a deliverer of message. Therefore, this thread you are starting is a great one, and I hope the rest of the team jumps in and offers their thoughts and visions for the future of our team.
p.s. when is Novell hiring a replacement for Zonker :P
Good question. Let's see if we can ask around and find out...
Cheers, -R. Tyler Ballance -------------------------------------- GitHub: http://github.com/rtyler Twitter: http://twitter.com/agentdero
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