On 2020/07/12 22:59, Tuomas Hietala wrote: > The big issue I'd like to bring up is that the assumptions behind the > marketing plan and Michael's analysis seem to be somewhat anglo/eurocentric, > or perhaps more accurately global north / major language centric".
That is because historically: * LibreOffice made the most inroads in western/central Europe; * Has been dominated by L1 & L2 users of English; ** If L1 & L2 users of Spanish dominated, the marketing plan would be more Hispanic orientated; ** If L1 & L2 readers of Kanji/Hanzi dominated, the marketing plan would be more CJKV orientated; *** etc. The hope/expectation is that the local (country/language) community will adapt it, to their local needs & issues. >I live in Finland (very much in the global north, but not a player in the >major language league > hear that in some countries lots of big companies are using LO and finding it > as good as to need neither paid support nor MS Office. Typically, what has happened, is that some idiot convinced the company that FLOSS was gratis, and that that also mean that support was gratis. Since the value proposition that they were sold on, was that there would never be a financial outlay for FLOSS, that is what they do. This value proposition pops up, whenever politicians try to move their government agency from FLOSS to a proprietary solution. Obviously, it is misleading, but technically, it is not inaccurate. > Finland, MSO is ubiquitous in government and business, and the only > "enterprise-scale" deployments of LO I'm aware of are in schools and > universities. Even there, MS Office is generally the primary, recommended > office suite, with LO offered as an alternative. That is pretty much the case, wherever Microsoft has established itself. > Countries like Finland where LO struggles to be taken seriously in > business and government, whether due to political priorities or > interoperability issues or insufficient localisation (I'm working on > that...) or insufficient lobbying or lack of training materials or lack > of a volunteer support community are in a completely different situation > than countries like the UK where ODF is adopted in the government and all https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76842 is from a government agency in the UK, that didn't have a support contract. ODF might be official government policy, but funding for LibreOffice isn't guaranteed. > the world's English-language tutorials, templates and volunteer support are > just one internet search away. Focusing marketing efforts on nudging > non-paying users into buying support is premised on the idea that there are > lots of happy non-paying users in enterprise settings, which I doubt > is true at all in many parts of the world. > The interesting question is whether most of the world is more like > Finland or more like the UK in this respect. I'd be interested if > someone has actually done research on this, but my wild guess would be > more like Finland. > But another question arises: can you make more money by serving countries > like Finland or countries like the UK? Most likely the latter. The figure to look at, is gross profit, not gross revenue. (Google translate is acting up on me, again, so I had to rely on my ability to read/translate Finnish.) If I understood the Finnish government site on SMBs, the average SMB in Finland has a lower annual gross revenue, than the average SMB in the UK. However, it looks like their profit margins were about the same. Looking at the data from Lesotho, both gross revenue, and profit margins for SMBs are lower than the Finland. Creating a new market is expensive. Maybe for Finland, definitely for Lesotho, a tech support company would literally be creating the market for FLOSS. In Finland, the "gift economy" aspect of FLOSS might not have as dramatic a negative impact on revenue, as in Lesotho. > So I can understand very well that the ecosystem companies want to go after > untapped potential in these large markets first. That's > certainly their right, but TDF's mission is not to serve only the major > languages and the global north. Over the last twenty or so years, there have been organisations, usually non-profit, in various parts of the globe, whose mission has been to introduce FLOSS to minority language users. Their efforts have subsided over time, mainly due to a combination of inadequate funding, and well placed bribes by vendors of proprietary solutions. In talking with people who study, and protect extinct/endangered languages, they uniformly emphasized that what is needed is for the tools to be able to correctly display the glyphs, and provides accurate spell checking and grammar checking. Users, for the most part, are bilingual in both the endangered language, and the local dominant language. Having the UI in a language other than the endangered one, is usually acceptable, but some groups do consider it a matter pride, when the UI is in their language, even if they can't read it. Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Punjabi, German, Javanese, Malay, Telugu, Viet, Korean, French, Marathi, Tamil, or Urdu is the L1 language of roughly 57% of the global population. The L1 or L2 language of roughly 90% of the global population, is one of those languages. Thus, I would expect the major players in the LibreOffice Ecosystem to support those languages, whilst local firms did the hard work of evangelising FLOSS, providing l10n services, support, and bug fixes for the other 5990 odd natural languages that are currently spoken. > The code that the ecosystem companies commit into LO benefits everyone > regardless of country or language, of course. But TDF should still be > careful not to alienate the volunteer community. I'd say in most cases, > without volunteer localisers drawn from an existing userbase, there > would be no business opportunity for the ecosystem companies. The market > for professional support outside of the major languages is unlikely to > bootstrap itself without help from volunteers, governments or NGOs. Typically, what happens with government funding, is that one gets an initial grant, to translate, or localise a specific program/group of programs, but there is no follow-up money, and locally generated revenue doesn't cover enough to fund ongoing l10n development. The ideal scenario, is that after the initial localisation is done, a local commercial outfit gets a support contract with a government agency, which is enough to cover both the needs of the specific agency, and fund ongoing l10n development. Ideally, the code changes from the L10N work, go upstream, and are incorporated in future product releases. jonathon -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
