[libreoffice-marketing] Re: [libreoffice-design] Moving to LibreOffice 8?

[paul hofseth]

you might reason that since humans behave like herd animals, so that 
when some run, all run. The  stimulus evoking action  must be the most 
convincing, hence
the facts can be distorted.

For Libre office number eight it might suffice to claim the usual "the 
changes will assure your improved experience and safety". WHile making 
it quite clear that one i just mirroring the unscientific postures of 
other computing programs.

p.



Den 06-04-2023 12:06 skreiv Italo Vignoli:
> On 06/04/23 10:08, Eyal Rozenberg wrote:
> 
>> That is exactly what I'm opposing. Let's assume that the real 
>> situation is "boring" (I'm not sure that's the case, but still) and 
>> that, indeed, the changes since 7 are not fundamental enough to merit 
>> a version bump on their own (and I realize this is not in consensus 
>> either). In this state of affairs, evoking artificial interest in a 
>> new major version without substance behind it is a _marketing trick_, 
>> a psychological manipulation. One could even say it's mis-informing 
>> our users. It hurts user trust. Sure, it's not terrible to play with 
>> version numbers, but - I don't think that's something our users, 
>> current and potential, would like us to do.
> 
> All major releases of Microsoft Office are managed by marketing, as all 
> major releases of proprietary software and hardware companies, and not 
> by developers, and are based on what you call "marketing tricks".
> 
> By the way, marketing is a profession - as development - which is based 
> on a specific professional background, and on a mindset which is 100% 
> different from the mindset of a developer.
> 
> This is probably the reason why developers, and in general people with 
> a strong technical background, do not understand marketing and consider 
> it useless. Marketing is the opposite of science, and is based on 
> behaviour analisys (which is the "least scientific" science, although 
> some people are trying to "smuggle" it as science).
> 
> I have been a marketing executive for the last 42 years (since 1981), 
> and the best marketing strategies I have managed during that time have 
> been based on gut feelings (including the launch of Photoshop and PDF, 
> when I was a marketing consultant for Adobe, and they both were huge 
> success).
> 
> Given that Microsoft Office's market share is well over 50%, it looks 
> like users of office suites do like marketing tricks. Please remember 
> that around 98% of users are not able to judge features.
> 
> I am not contributing to QA for a very simple reason: I am not able to 
> understand if the software behaviour is right or wrong (unless is clear 
> as in the case of font embedding in macOS), and this is because I am 
> not interested in technical details but I look at the wider picture.
> 
> Even if I am technically illiterate, outside the open source 
> environment I am considered a geek because I usually am more competent 
> than 98% of "normal" software users.
> 
> It should be clear that 80% (and probably more) of what we communicate 
> is targeted to "normal" software users, and not to community members or 
> to people with a technical background, who are already using 
> LibreOffice (or refuse to use it for technical reasons). They are not 
> our target, given that office suites are commodities.
> 
> Our target is mis-informed and mis-educated by Microsoft, but doesn't 
> realize it. On the contrary, they trust Microsoft more than they trust 
> open source software.
> --
> Italo Vignoli - italo at vignoli.org
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