On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote:
You might really say that this is a problem of Open Source as a whole. Its marketing really sucks.
Double plus for Free Software.
Similarly and earlier, Leon Brocard wrote:
[Perl PR] needs people to just do it. The right place for this discussion is the perl advocacy mailing list ...
I find Mark Dominus's points - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/12/advocacy.html - very persuasive (summary: advocacy can easily decend into a tribal "Perl rocks, $WHATEVER sucks", which is neither persusasive, nor good for a language such as Perl, which improves by borrowing solutions from other languages).
"Sell the benefit - not the technology".
Does that apply to _anything_?
I'm not sure it sells cars. Apart from a passing nod to safety, independent traction control, four-wheel drive etc. is all sold on the basis of 'cool'.
True. But cars are a particularly sharp example of that, in my opinion. Take a look around you on the tube - adverts seem to fall fairly cleanly into a number of approaches to selling products.
- Price. Some airlines, insurance companies, telcos get your attention by claiming to be able to do something very cheaply or easily.
- Because it works. (Or because claiming it works is part of the placebo effect).
- By making the brand, or the product seem cool, or something to aspire to.
- By making the product a badge of membership of some tribe/subculture/whatever
- Humour, or "ironically" knocking the idea of a brand as a badge.
And so on, until the marketing guys get bored.
I believe some of these approaches are relatively novel (ie. have become popular since the mid 70s - I gather that the public got bored with lots of increasingly-transparent 'this product will make you a beautiful person with a yacht').
The trouble with PR is that people start to ignore you. You may find yourself having to be more subtle and sinister. Or turn though 180 degrees, and be more honest.
(See http://www.rickross.com/reference/cults_in_our_midst/cults_in_our_midst2.html )
Habits of payware software that Open Source people seem diabolically keen to imitate:
1. Buzzwords. "Content management system" is a favourite, which seems taggable onto virtually any system regardless of functionality. "Assets" as umbrella term for "nonplaintext-content" (typically .jpg/.pdf/etc) is truely Orwellian - on most sites, the graphics are NOT the key assets, they are decorative.
2. Huge products. M$ does very well (?) making word processors that need unthinkable computer power to operate, then monopolising them. It is doubtful whether economies of scale operate the same way for open source.
(a) "small pieces, loosely integrated". Like the Internet/WWW. *NOT* like Prestel or minitel. More topically, *NOT* like the American mains grid on the eastern seabord (;
(b) With open source, you don't HAVE to do everything the user wants. If you make it possible for people to add and maintain extensions, this is potentially much more powerful.
3. Systems that abruptly screech to a halt, and ask you to "confirm" things with irritating little popup boxes.
...
Cheers
Ti
