Kaj, This is a wonderful idea. If we can find some real, solid marketshare data to counter the specious claims of Microsoft's "95%", we will probably open the doors to a lot of undecided or indifferent people to start using OpenOffice. Breaking down the assumption that "everyone is using product X, and therefore I must also" would be a huge achievement.
I will be at FOSSCamp Boston (http://fosscamp.org/) in a few weeks and will talk to people there. (Jono Bacon, community manager for Ubuntu, is scheduled to attend.) I know that Mozilla people are usually willing to work with us too, so that's another place we should check in. If anyone has contacts that might be useful, please get in touch with them and let us know what you learn. Thanks, Ben ---- OpenOffice and open source blog: http://www.solidoffice.com/ Wiki business directory: http://www.wikipages.com/ On Friday, October 12, 2007, at 08:34AM, "Kaj Kandler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >Hash: SHA1 > >Benjamin, >good observation. What are the other marketing departments of OSS saying >about this? Mozilla, Apache, Ubuntu, ...? I think this is a wide spread >issue if true and we should focus on making all in the OSS community >aware of it. Can we try to collaborate with some economics professors, >in order to study the general phenomena and then use their research in >order to blog, give presentations at conferences, unconferences, post in >mailing lists, etc. > >I think we should pose the question to the researchers, how they measure >the market share. > >Kaj > >Benjamin Horst wrote: >> The first line in the article perpetuates a fallacy that we need to >> combat. It claims that MS Office has 95% marketshare! >> >> Recently I became very skeptical of this number, and did some research >> to find out what it means. Unlike what one would expect, it does not >> mean that 95% of users (PC users or office software users, pick one >> market) use Microsoft Office. According to Wharton business school at >> University of Pennsylvania, it means that 95% of the revenue collected >> for the sale of office suites goes to MS. Thus, our free product is not >> measured in this statistic at all! >> (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1795) >> >> If you measure marketshare as number of computers with the software >> installed, as a percentage of all computers, then Microsoft has far less >> than 95% and OOo has a good slice: Microsoft claims to have about 400 >> million MSO users, and some estimates place OOo users at 100 million. >> With these simple numbers, MS has 80% marketshare and we have 20% >> (obviously excluding other players; maybe these numbers could be refined). >> >> We need to propagate the meme that MS has 80% marketshare and we have >> 20%. This will make it clear to people that MS is vulnerable and we are >> growing strongly and quickly. In turn, it will make more people feel >> comfortable adopting our suite. >> >> To spread this meme, we need to write articles about it, comment on >> blogs, email editors of articles like this one, and publish our numbers >> as much as possible! Please, everyone get in touch with the author of >> today's article--there's a comment link at the bottom! >> >> -Ben >> >> On Oct 12, 2007, at 12:07 AM, Kaj Kandler wrote: >> >> Hi guys, >> have you read this article? >> >> http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewfeature&id=1483 >> >> It's about a study "To pay or not to pay for & Office software." >> >> Has some interesting Marketing results. Free is not the differentiator, >> but safety that the product is maintained and will be around in a few >> years. >> >> Kaj >>> >- --------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> > >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >- -- >Kaj Kandler >Conficio - http://www.conficio.com/ >Phone: +1 (781) 632 5773 > >*** Technical support for non technical users of OpenOffice.org *** >*** http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/ *** >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- >Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (MingW32) > >iD8DBQFHD2lqRDUvrJRNjTARAn69AJ42Lpb2f/RSj8XE2jbW6YnN2ruYQgCfUzlz >HxGC6dcLVrjqg/u3o5rwLR8= >=CJz8 >-----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
