This discussion on how to market AbiWord got me thinking and I have another
suggestion. This one is sort of a twist on getting another company to distribute
AbiWord with their product. The ideas is to get another software company to put a
link(preferably a flashy one) to AbiWord on the same webpage for downloads and updates
to their software. This would have a the slightly added benifit of catching people
while they are in the mode of updating of installing software and thus are more likely
to take a little time to install AbiWord.
The best place to have such a link to AbiWord, therefore would be a software
website that gets lots of traffic for upgrading to new versions. Thus, I suggest that
the easiest prospect for such marketing is another open-source/free software project
that has wide-spread appeal and reach, and is still releasing updates often,
Netscape-Mozilla project. This would allow for wide spread exposure even if the
Mozilla project doesn't want to embed AbiWord.
Another, tougher sell but possibly a chance of reaching even more people would be to
convince an anti-virus software website to carry a link to AbiWord on their virus data
files update page, this way when ever anyone using the anti-virus software updates
their protection against viruses they see a link to a "free word processor." This
would probably be a harder sell then getting a link on the Netscape download page, but
might be possible if the company could be convinced that the customers would view such
a link as being offered more for their money by the company, rather than imposed upon
by the link. Hopefully, this is helpful and feel free to email me comments, criticsm,
and expansions on this idea.
Scott Rushfeldt
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
