-- Andres Betts On July 1, 2015 at 11:52:39 AM, Robert Schweikert (rjschwei@suse.com(mailto:rjschwei@suse.com)) wrote:
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On 07/01/2015 01:05 PM, Jay wrote:
I'm having a huge cognitive dissonance after having read this.
Are you really sure you want to forego the "normal" user (like me) for developers/admins?
No, there is no foregoing intention.
But we do not want to/cannot compete with Mark Shuttleworth on the marketing front for the "normal" user, at least not at this point ;)
It is about defining a target group for focused marketing messaging. This does not imply we will attempt to change the nature of the project. Whatever you as "normal" user find appealing today is intended to remain just as it is.
I never thougth of openSUSE as the distribution for just those two groups.
It is not
For me it was always the least riskiest, easiest to install, high-quality alternative to Windows.
And I would be surprised if the good download-numbers for 13.2 came from developers and admins. I think they came from people who had a favourable experience with 12.3/13.1, from positive reviews and word of mouth.
But I may be wrong.
A focussing-strategy is almost never wrong. But you have to be prepared to make sacrifices. The more you focus and the more effective your strategy, the more you have to sacrifice. That is: loose those who do not belong to your target groups.
Given that we have no consistent marketing effort today we have to start somewhere. It is hard to compete, when there is one guy who is willing to shout from every rooftop of the world and from space how great X is. I do not see the risk that those that have already found us will run away just because a marketing message says "The Makers Choice for Developers". I agree that this will not attract many new "normal" users. However, these conditions were taken into consideration when the board came up with the proposal and hopefully it came across in the keynote.
And if your strategy really works, you can't come back in two years and say: "Now we want the desktop-user". Because then your position already is "The distribution for developers and sys-admins".
I am not certain I would agree with this. I could possibly agree if the nature of the project would change and we'd drop all the cool things we have for desktop users, but that is not the intent. We do have to keep "what's in the distribution and OBS" separate from "what do we broadcast to the world."
At present we broadcast, there is no more or less continuous broadcast as already mentioned, everything in the distro and OBS to the world. The proposal is that we narrow that broadcast to specific pieces that appeal to specific groups. This should make it easier to form a campaing around a given theme and be successful. In two years when we have more confidence and feel stronger maybe we do want to start broadcasting to a different target audience with different technical parts of the project backing up that broadcast. Marketing campaigns change all the time. Just because there is currently no active Unix to SUSE Linux marketing campaign doesn't mean that this is not still a good idea ;) It just means that at present marketing efforts are being spent elsewhere.
I don't say that's wrong. I just want to make you aware of the fact that this is a long-term strategic decision that you can not change just like that.
And you will have to live with the consequences.
I do not see it this dire. If it were, I'd say we'd have no car company that makes trucks and cars in many varieties all under the same brand. Look at Chevy, Ford, you name it. They market to different target audiences with different messages. When the target audience are people that work in construction you see a truck in the add not the little car with a hybrid engine. When the target audience are people that care about fuel consumption the picture and slogan are tailored to that group. It's still the same company, the products may even come from the same factory. Both products will have many nuts, bolts, and other things in common. The marketing of the products they produce is different for different audiences. We just don't have the people to create 5 or 6 different marketing campaigns all at once. It is not even certain if we have enough people interested in forming one marketing campaign for one target audience.
I think that you have pointed out a subject that we can review later. Maybe let’s keep this one for a different thread in the future. We could have multiple marketing strategies for different products done by openSUSE. Now we need 1, for a target audience of a higher technical background. In the future we could discuss further strategies for other related audiences.
We cannot boil the ocean. One campaign at a time ;)
Later, Robert
- -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Public Cloud Architect LINUX rjschwei@suse.com IRC: robjo -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2
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