On 06/04/13 23:00, Chris Pelon wrote:
That's my point, if there was a strong community and clear marketing message
SME could be positioned better to the small business owner.
Cultures differ from place to place, buy my experience is that small
business owners don't care a lot what OS their system runs, only how
much it costs and if/when it will break, with perhaps a nod to extra
features "for later on".
A good consultant will make their client perfectly happy without them
ever even asking what system is running on the server. I think that if
there's marketing to do, it's not to the business owners because even if
for no other reason, reaching them costs heaps of money (TV ads and so on).
I think marketing directly to consultants and techies and resellers and
so on is a better way to go if we need to get more users.
Plus, now that SBS is no longer going to be sold, the small business will
not even have the option to purchases SBS (legit or not). Microsoft is trying
to force all small businesses into the cloud with products like Office 365 and
eliminating on premise servers. Many small businesses still like control of
their data and servers which will put SME in a good position.
Agreed! Especially if the SME Server could do extra CoolThings that lots
of other Linuxes can do but it can't or won't -- sometimes by design. I
give a customer an awesome "does everything" server, and it can even
host a website! But not the DNS for that, you need to rely on afraid.org
or someone else. It can host files! But there's no drop-boxish
interface to make it easy. It can sync all your calendars! If you
install funambol -- and sort of.
Of course, a lot of the especially impressive stuff can all be done with
add-ons like simpleinvoices and vTiger and osticket and asterix any one
of hundreds of others -- but now they are paying per hour for me to
setup and configure all this stuff. It would be pretty cool if I could
install them fully supported with apt-get or an equivalent. What would
a fully integrated asterix installation look like?
If you take the top ten most popular cloud services for business, then
see which ones SME can't currently do, I think that's a strong
development focus.
Perhaps the basic SME server should be what it is, but a paid version
gets you a repository with amazing software preconfigured? The problem
with this idea though is that someone needs to invest the enormous time
and effort up front to develop something tempting enough. Maybe a
kickstarter would help, since even if it doesn't raise enough money, it
might raise the profile of the project in the right places.
1. Has the idea of paid commercial support been explored. I for one
would be interested in offering this.
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=38535.0
The core unofficial business model (IMHO) is that you-and-I provide paid
commercial support to the end businesses with back-end donations (tithes?
Whatever you like really) to the paypal account mentioned in other posts.
My problem is that I'm really slack at making those back end donations because
I'm nearly always in debt, so in essence I end up paying interest on any
donations I make! It's a poor excuse. My other excuse is that most of my
customers are non-profits and veteran's care agencies and so on -- but this too
is a poor excuse. I have donated less that I should have.
I would think it would make sense to have a list of local IT companies listed
on the website for small business owners to contact for support when they need
it and have the SME community charge a small monthly fee to the IT service
provider to be listed. That way you will be giving back to the project and
hopefully getting leads to charge for SME installation and support services.
Could be a win win for everyone.
A strong idea that's been more or less tried before, but it relies on
various methods and techniques to drive traffic to the website in order
to produce significant amounts of revenue. Currently, relevant google
searches don't include "us", as far as I can tell.
Someone mentioned ClearOS, so now I'm aware that it's a competitor in
the same market space, and I'd never heard of it before this
discussion. I had a look, it's very pretty. Is it as good in practical
terms? If someone objective would be so good as to contact me off-list,
I'd love to hear why it is or isn't better than SME. It looks as though
it's got lots of utilities but it's far less practically useful, as far
as I can tell.
Sorry for being four days behind the list with my replies, please let me
know if I'm not adding value to the discussion and I'll tone it down a
little!
_______________________________________________
Discussion about project organisation and overall direction
To unsubscribe, e-mail [email protected]
Searchable archive at http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
