Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi,

I agree with many things you wrote in your post; I really do!

This is why I have to nitpick a little bit: ;-)

 1.) Intel markets itself to end users to be able to receive a premium
for its products and/or sell more.

 2.) Quality is seldomly a one-dimensional measure for buyers.

To use words as 'obvious choice' and 'unambiguously better' is in most
cases wrong. I believe your conclusions are thus not quite right:
There's quite a lot we need to convince end users of.

Cheers,
Claus



On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:28:05 -0500
Dan Winship <danw novell com> wrote:

> Sri Ramkrishna wrote:
> > I met the guy who did firefox's community (and release manager I
> > believe)stuff (and I think marketing) at OSCON.  He said he would be
> > happy to talk with us about what he did to help Firefox.
>
> Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide 
> that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't 
> download and install "Gnome". The closest they can come is to download 
> and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, which (even 
> ignoring the huge difference in scale between a web browser and a 
> distro) is a totally different thing. How would we tell users to install 
> GNOME if we had a New York Times ad? Would we pick a preferred distro? 
> Or let anyone who wanted to contribute money to the ad be able to put in 
> a plug for their distro (even if that distro was really hard to install 
> and was likely to end up driving users away)?
>
> We can't sell ourselves directly to end users. We need to sell ourselves 
> to Linux distros, and get them to sell *themselves* to end users. We're 
> not like Firefox, we're like Intel! [Cue "Intel Inside" chimes] The vast 
> majority of our "customers" don't "buy" our product directly, they're 
> getting it as an integral part of someone else's product. Even if they 
> do understand that this other product contains our product, they aren't 
> going to be able to explain exactly what our part does for the combined 
> product, where our part of the product ends and the other vendor's part 
> begins, or how the possible alternatives to our product would make 
> things different for them. At best, they'll be able to say "well, this 
> one has 2.8 and that other one has 2.6, so I'll get this one because it 
> has a bigger number!"
>
> Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean we want to market ourselves the 
> same way Intel does. Intel definitely markets itself to end users, but 
> that's just part of its strategy to sell chips to PC manufacturers, who 
> are its real customers. By convincing end users that PCs with Intel 
> chips are better/faster/more-likely-to-get-them-laid than PCs with AMD 
> chips, they keep the demand for Intel-based PCs high, which keeps the 
> manufacturers buying lots of chips, which keeps Intel in business.
>
> We could apply the same technique: convince end users that GNOME is 
> better for them, so that they will preferentially install distros that 
> use GNOME, so that distros (our real customers) will use GNOME as their 
> preferred desktop. But there's a problem. (Sri, you might want to stop 
> reading here :-). Intel only markets itself to end users because its 
> products *aren't* any better than its competitors'. If their chips were 
> unambiguously better than AMDs, then the PC manufacturers wouldn't need 
> to be convinced to stay with Intel, it would just be the obvious choice.
>
> The same principle should hold for GNOME. If we are actually better than 
> our competitors, than all we have to do is make sure that the distros 
> realize this (by marketing ourselves *to the distros*), and we win. And 
> if we *aren't* better than our competitors, then we're working against 
> users' interests if we try to convince them otherwise.
>
> (And what are we going to convince end users of anyway? "Use GNOME! It 
> has Epiphany! [Unless you're using Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or anything 
> else.] It doesn't have an office suite!" GNOME isn't a whole story unto 
> itself. "Desktop Linux" is the story, but that's not a story we can tell 
> on our own.)
>
> -- Dan
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