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Subject: Re: [opensuse-project] Strategy Discussion
From: Andreas Jaeger
Please note that the strategy discussion looks at the big picture first - and then we'll have to see what this means for all the details,
I'd like to go back to basic once again and talk about fundamental strategies for openSUSE, that is, what we should aim at as openSUSE Project. In marketing point of view, it is very important to define who are our *customers* and imagine what are their needs. "Of course, everyone and everything!" would be the easiest but an empty answer for this question and let us argue in a circle. Who are our customers may depends upon where we stand. As a distributer, users (and potencial users) are our main customers. But as a project, developers and contributers might be the more important customers than mere users. Obviously, the strategies will be differ from each other. So, let's see our users first. Looking at the result of our last survay[1], our current typical users are 20 to 39 years old (total 66.4%) men (98.1%) who are experienced in using computer (total 96.9%), use Windows in addition to openSUSE (61.6%) and do not participate in the openSUSE project (64.3%). They use openSUSE mostly for their personal use (59.7%) and don't use openSUSE as a server (56.4%). They value stability (82.1%), security (71.0%) and hardware support (63.7%) when they choose operating system and very strongly expect openSUSE to support much more desktop (55.6%)/netbook (36.9%) hardwares. I know there are so called silent majority behind, but we can imagine current typical openSUSE users at least. What we should discuss here is, whether we should focus in particular on the polish and enhancement of our current advantages or spend time with our current weaknesses. In other words, which we should more focus in, our current experienced users or persons who haven't been interested in using openSUSE ever? "Both" may be the ideal answer here, but in that case we have to condsider the priority, because the necessary methods may vary according to which we choose. [1] http://en.opensuse.org/images/3/3a/SurveySummary_03012010.pdf Unfortunately I don't have enough time to write my further thoughts and opinions on this topic right now, but above is one of the points that I think we have to share and think about when we discuss our strategy. I'd like to thank everyone who are involved in this topic and attend the meeting today, and hope the meeting will be productive and all attendee will have fun. ;-) Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org