For those portions of the world that celebrate Christmas, in the next three weeks we're coming into a major gift-giving season. I recently bought a new PC as a gift for a family member. Anyone buying a new PC faces several questions: how much RAM, how big a hard drive, but also: what version of Microsoft Office to bundle? Home and School? Professional? Small Business? The PC vendors get a sweet deal from Microsoft to push Office. Although you can opt out and save $200 or so, the PC vendors never seem to offer or even explain that there are free alternatives.
This is a hard nut to crack. As a free product, we're in many cases better for the consumer. But we can't offer the same kind of kick back / revenue sharing with the PC vendor that a commercial product can do. 10% of zero is still zero. But maybe we can have a promotion directly to the consumer, raising their awareness of free alternatives? Brainstorming -------------------- "OpenOffice -- our gift to the world" (too pompous?) Image of Santa's elves writing open source software New lyrics to traditional song like "Jingle Bells" (Open source, open source, saving you big dough. Oh what fun it is to save by using AOO!) "With the money I saved using Apache OpenOffice I bought a...." Could be a blog post, but a video would be even better. Could be reused year after year.
