[Promotion] Hello, my name is John

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Monday 27 February 2006 09:11, Quim Gil wrote:
> There must be something to learn from i.e. the bicycle industry.
>
> They sponsor and lobby with grassroots assotiations in order to get more
> cycling infrastructures in the cities, they promote mountain bike
> magazines and competitions, they push with corporations in order to get
> more TV minutes of Tour de France, they seduce the Science journalist
> with futuristic prototypes... The battle of 'which city bike is better
> (for me)' is exposed only to the users facing the purchase of a bike,
> the rest of possible users just see more bicicles everywhere.
>
> We could do something similar. Make sure citizens see more free desktops
> everywhere.

I like the idea in general, but do you have any specific courses of action in 
mind? Analogous activities to those of bicycle manufacturers could include 
anything, really, that we do already or have dreamt of doing. The only 
concrete change I can think of is that we'd celebrate deployments of the free 
desktop rather than KDE/GNOME. I'd be *very* happy to do this but I can 
imagine it would be controversial amongst many contributors in the respective 
projects.

In a sense it makes much more sense for us to focus most of our market 
research & promotion efforts on the free desktop first, since a lot of people 
behind large deployments will be asking the 'Free desktop or Windows or 
MacOSX' question before they ask the 'KDE or GNOME' question. The KDE/GNOME 
apps on Windows/MacOSX issue complicates this of course...

> This implies we assume that desktop A is not better than B or C, but
> different. And this is possibly the necessary kernel for a
> collaborative, non-competitive efficient marketing strategy.

I love the goal, but don't we need to establish better what the strengths and 
weaknesses of the free desktop, GNOME and KDE are first before we can do 
this? Who are the market segments, the user profiles, that we're targetting 
now? How interested are they in the 'KDE or GNOME' question, and what 
differences are they interested in? And so on...

Kind regards,
Tom

-- 
I'm aware that e-mails to me may be blocked by my host
because they are mistaken as spam. If this happens, 
please e-mail me at: telex4 at yahoo.com