I agree with the sentiment that we need to market Chandler in terms
of what people already 'know' they want or need a solution for. I'm
not sure it should start with calendaring.
For one, how do we differentiate ourselves from other web calendar
services? The offline functionality doesn't seem compelling enough on
its own.
Second, I *have* had success demo-ing Chandler to people by pitching
it as something that ties all the bits and pieces of information you
have floating around in your head, Inbox, random text files together:
Personal and shared 'source of truth' manager. I agree that this is a
hard pitch to get right, but I don't think we've given this angle a
fair shot yet. We're only starting to articulate it in the long-hand
form now.
What I am trying to get at is that there is something in the
combination of Faceted Sidebar, Triage-Dashboard and Stamping that is
substantively, significantly different and more valuable than filters
+ hierarchy in other PIMs / Task Managers. In many ways, the design
we have today is in response to the 'just build a filtered view'
approach to information management.
This 'thing' we've had trouble articulating doesn't have to be what
we communicate in the marketing pitch. But I think that to come up
with a compelling pitch, we need to start with a clear understanding
of it. Otherwise, how can we go about helping others to see and
experience it?
Mimi
On Dec 21, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
Our edit/update capability right now is way too primitive, and
triage isn't different enough from what other PIMs can do to be a
big seller. In particular, it won't impress early adopters and PIM
geeks ("I can do that with a filter, duh"). Calendar sharing (with
mention of standards compliance and the ability to have plugins)
will be more impressive, and the simplicity of the app will be a
win for people who have to support this. (Not to mention the open
source part.)
In other words, the most likely way a workgroup will end up using
this is if their IT guy or resident techie sees that it gets the
calendaring job done and won't be hard to teach/support their
users. So the audience for this demo is actually those people who
would do the recommending. Thus, the commentary would need to
briefly mention things here and there about the SSL security, hub
account management, etc.
This is part of our target. But I think we can reach beyond this
audience. People start using tools like OmniOutliner on their own, I
don't see why Chandler can't reach the same kind of users.
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