On Fri, May 19, 2006 05:35, André Wyrwa wrote:
>
> Hei,
>
> This is a crossposting.
>
> I'm crossposting this to the marketing list, because it concerns
> marketing more now.

Agreed, let's do follow-ups there

[snip]
> I really think OpenOffice.org can live without the same marketing crap
> that everyone else does. Let's not just repeat the crap, let's be both
> creative and user oriented...not only on the development side.
>
> Sorry, getting a little polemic here, again. ;-)

Polemical is good :-)

> Anyway, my proposal:
> - - welcoming
> - - liberating
> - - rewarding

There's some good stuff here. Presenting the key benefits of OOo on a web
page that can be read at a glance is not easy. The typical user has a
(probably illegal, probably old) copy of MS-Office on their PC and they
see no benefit in changing. If they hear something about this free
software stuff, they probably think it must be rubbish simply because it
is free (and nothing is ever really free - there's always a catch
somewhere), and it's not a known brand like Microsoft, and it took them
years to learn MS-O, and they've got all these Word documents they use, so
why should they bother?

So, the plan is two-fold.

First of all, we need to identify trigger points which will cause people
to even consider changing. If MS do a big anti-piracy drive, that will
make some folks uneasy - hence "Get Legal, Get OpenOffice". There are
other trigger points too, such as buying a new PC and finding it hasn't
got MS-O installed (a lot of people think all PCs just come with MS-O).
We'll be doing more trigger campaigning to drive people to why :-)

Secondly, once someone has a motive to look at OOo, we then have to
convince them:

* OOo will actually do everything that MS-O does for them - otherwise they
won't even consider it
* They won't have to go back to school or retype all their files
* It really won't cost them any money either for the software or if they
do find they need help

So the front page of why.openoffice.org has to address these three
concerns, which is what the three slogans are trying to do. Mousing over
the slogans gives the chance to present a bit more of the story. Clicking
on a slogan will give the whole story on a new page.

I'm not convinced the slogans are right - let's have the discussion.

On the honesty part - I do actually believe this marketing crap. We did a
lot of usability stuff between OOo 1 and 2 to make it easier for MS-O
folks to use OOo - some folks thought we went too far and started to
compromise the original OOo design. If we don't believe the product is
right for the mass-market, we should just stick to preaching to those
already converted to the open-source religion. I hope our ambitions are
bigger than that.

John


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