Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
James E Lang wrote: I really wish there were a LO Calc implementation for Android to use in place of Kingsoft Office. I don't feel secure using a proprietary office product; especially one from China. There is AndroidOpenOffice. Whilst closed source, it is based upon Apache Open Office, to the point of including most of the obvious, and all of the non-obvious AOo tells. (I'm not sure, but I think it is simply a recompiled version of AOO, with things that throw errors simpoly commented out. Then latter rewritten to comppile correctly.) jonathon -- Sent from the eating establishment at the Far side of the Universe, at the begining of Time, and at the end of Space. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
tk wrote: There is AndroidOpenOffice. I tried that a while ago, on my Nexus 7, and it didn't work very well. I uninstalled it. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
James Knott wrote: There is AndroidOpenOffice. I tried that a while ago, on my Nexus 7, and it didn't work very well. It is very inconsistent in how well it works. The updates, bug-fixes, etc. can either be much better, or much worse than the previous version. For the most part, releases within the last month are much more stable, and offer more features that work as expected, than releases from even four months ago. All that said, I don't think it quite yet suitable for mission critical work. jonathon -- Sent from the eating establishment at the Far side of the Universe, at the begining of Time, and at the end of Space. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
--8=== Le Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:22:32 +, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk a écrit : Hi :) My thought is that we need to promote 1. LibreOffice first 2. other programs that can use the format as their native format 3. the format 4. the community 5. the fact that even MS Office's most recent versions can read/write the format too now 6. ethical issues In roughly that order. I don't think people who need to write letters are always particularly interested in anything other than just finding a program that can do the job. The marketing team have decided to promote the community as the product that people buy into (for free) but i think a lot of people will continue to see the product as being the program. I think they are going to confuse people with their current policy. I don't think it's wrong to promote the community or the format but from what i have seen people try the program first and then sometimes find those other things are an extra benefit. Tom, you're making some good points above, but I think that we may not be talking about the same thing. As a member of the marketing team, I cannot just say that we should stop promoting the product or rather the software as you rightly call it. I don't think we ever will. But when we are pushing to advocate the community this strategy exists because of specific goals and because we know that LibreOffice, as a software and as a product, cannot be marketed as an off the shelf product or even a traditionalsoftware. When you go down the path of productivising a software that's open source and developed by a community, you either do this because the software fulfills some very specific needs and some very specific niche, or you don't, because just like LibreOffice, you have twenty different kind of audiences, a whole set of complex or simple features appealing to, well, pretty much the entire planet, and that there can be no question of product positioning because you simply don't have enough funds and because the software caters to the needs of millions of people, businesses and governments. I've used some marketing terms here intently. But the point is that we have decided to shift the focus to community promotion, but not to forget about promoting software, keeping in mind that 1) nobody reads the release notes 2)the users' needs tend to be evolving over time 3) the financial dept wants to use their macros 4) we won't engage in endless pseudo marketing discussions such as how should we position LibreOffice? 5) it should be a fun thing to do anyway. Promoting the format alone doesn't seem to work. People have immense trouble finding File - Save As ... It's tooo geeky for a lot of people. They click on the Save button and have no idea where it's being saved or what format it's in. Windows hides the format for all file-types by default so very few people understand anything about formats. Yes that's true. Open Standards are crucial; however, good luck explaining this to the large majority of people who think a word document is MS Word the software. Promoting the software alone doesn't work either. Although, to be fair, it is going a LOT better under TDF than it went under Sun. Sun seemed reticent about promoting OOo in the USA, England and possibly other countries that have English as the supposedly dominant language. Under TDF LibreOffice is becoming more widely known about. Unlike Sun, TDF is managing to get into fairly mainstream articles in fairly mainstream press. So it's really Sun's total lack of advertising and promotion that had been holding OOo/LO/AOO back for the first decade. Rather than choosing a wrong direction they chose NONE and that is what led us nowhere. Thanks for the nice words here but I think that it's probably more complex than that; and I am not alone thinking we must do much more in these geographies. As LibreOffice usage rises so does usage of the format. But usage of the format follows. It doesn't lead the way. Most of us started by trying to stick with MS formats, perhaps even setting the defaults to MS formats (i did that). After a while each of us begins to realise that it's not the optimum format and so we gradually change to keeping originals in ODF and only using MS ones to share with outsiders. Soon we are going to be able to use ODF to share with outsiders. Three years ago some people would write to this list or comment under articles to say that LibreOffice didn't have something they wanted so they would have to return to MS Office. A tad irksome because we would often find the functionality did exist or that same end-result could be obtained by some more efficient route. Those few people had just found it easier to spend more time registering and writing a grumble rather than bothering to spend any effort looking up how to do the task. Nowadays people write in to apologise that they have
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Le Sun, 1 Dec 2013 19:09:57 +, Tom Davies tomc...@gmail.com a écrit : Hi :) I think the largest company in the eco-system is beginning to be TDF! IBM is larger but it doesn't seem to want to be a big name in office desktops. Does the ODF Alliance still exist? Their website seems to be dead or perhaps just very out-of-date. Perhaps people from TDF could get involved in updating it? We don't control anything on the ODF Alliance website, which was never an actual entity and today it's been left inactive for several years already. Perhaps Apache might be interested in giving it a boost too? Perhaps it's just that it's main reasons for existence are over now? That is what some would call an insightful remark :-) OASIS is a LOT more lively. Last i heard there were some (or at least 1) people from TDF involved in that. oh there are more, but keep in mind the OASIS is where ODF is made, not from where it gets promoted. The OASIS is a standards consortium, not an advocacy group. Also there seems to be TDF people involved in FSF (or is it FSF people involved in TDF?). Anyway, either way is good. I think it's the opposite, FSF is a sponsor of TDF. Best, Charles. Regards from Tom :) On 1 December 2013 16:40, Italo Vignoli italo.vign...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/12/13 14:14, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: Today, things are very different: - the ODF ecosystem is not so unified (and to explain why probably needs a whitepaper) Unfortunately, the largest company in the ecosystem is now focused on other objectives, and has been instrumental in splitting the ecosystem (and keeping it divided, in a way which makes it probably impossible to reunite). - Microsoft implements ODF... in a serious and very efficient way. We should be more effective in leveraging MS ODF support, though. -- Italo Vignoli - italo.vign...@gmail.com mob +39.348.5653829 - sip/jabber it...@libreoffice.org skype italovignoli - hangout/jabber italo.vign...@gmail.com -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder, The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint Mobile Number: +33 (0)6 98 65 54 24. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 11:38:12 AM +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: So Marco's personal beef with continuing to promote the software ahead of the format kinda misses the point that we never really put any effort into promoting the program. Any such effort used to be severely hampered by Sun. Promoting the program does seem to have worked a LOT better in the last 3 years than it worked in the preceding decade. We seem to be getting somewhere at last! Marco's points are in my own opinion not to be discarded as such. However I believe that Marco mixes marketing and the strategy of an ecosystem. Hi Charles-H, after a statement like this, hordes of people from all sectors of the economy that at this point would stop and just ask you so what? I mean, what's the difference between marketing and strategy??? But yours IS a fair point, because I too, in this specific thread, have mixed different we in my previous message. Sometimes we should have been we advocates of LO, other times it meant in my mind we all supporters of open standards, and I didn't make it clear enough. Of course, - no group can save the world alone - members of each group (have to) have different priorities and goals - people who choose to work specifically on LO/AOO/Calligra... (even if work is only providing volunteer support here or elsewhere) have to talk of that **software** more than file formats in general, digital divides and so on I have NO PROBLEM with all that. My only point is that the typical LO/AOO advocate should in almost all context to something like (making numbers up now just to outline the general concept!!!) FIRST, talk 20% of the time of formats THEN, talk 80% of how cool LO/AOO etc is otherwise we won't get anywhere quickly enough (see the twelve years post I already mentioned here) Marco -- M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com http://stop.zona-m.net Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how software is used *around* you -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Hello Marco, Le Sun, 1 Dec 2013 11:54:27 +0100, M. Fioretti mfiore...@nexaima.net a écrit : On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 11:38:12 AM +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: So Marco's personal beef with continuing to promote the software ahead of the format kinda misses the point that we never really put any effort into promoting the program. Any such effort used to be severely hampered by Sun. Promoting the program does seem to have worked a LOT better in the last 3 years than it worked in the preceding decade. We seem to be getting somewhere at last! Marco's points are in my own opinion not to be discarded as such. However I believe that Marco mixes marketing and the strategy of an ecosystem. Hi Charles-H, after a statement like this, hordes of people from all sectors of the economy that at this point would stop and just ask you so what? I mean, what's the difference between marketing and strategy??? Oh there is a difference of focus, concern, and thinking. If I sell sausages, I'd better be good at selling them by talking about their price, their taste and the great hot dogs I can make with them. But if I'm growing the sausage manufacturers'ecosystem, I can pitch very much the same points, but that does not do anything to address the concerns of the ecosystem's partners. I'd rather explain, for instance, what rebates system we can benefit from, or how we can pool our suppliers, etc. The two are not mutuallly exclusive, they just work on different levels. But yours IS a fair point, because I too, in this specific thread, have mixed different we in my previous message. Sometimes we should have been we advocates of LO, other times it meant in my mind we all supporters of open standards, and I didn't make it clear enough. Of course, - no group can save the world alone - members of each group (have to) have different priorities and goals - people who choose to work specifically on LO/AOO/Calligra... (even if work is only providing volunteer support here or elsewhere) have to talk of that **software** more than file formats in general, digital divides and so on I have NO PROBLEM with all that. My only point is that the typical LO/AOO advocate should in almost all context to something like (making numbers up now just to outline the general concept!!!) FIRST, talk 20% of the time of formats THEN, talk 80% of how cool LO/AOO etc is otherwise we won't get anywhere quickly enough (see the twelve years post I already mentioned here) Marco, I remember you've been a strong advocate of open standards for quite a long time, and both of us, among many others, have pitched and expressed ourselves about the fundamental importance of a standard format like ODF. We went all the way to the ISO and we know the good and the bad that came out of this. My position remains unchanged about open standards. But as you know there was a time when the ecosystem was much stronger and unified to promote ODF. Today, things are very different: - the ODF ecosystem is not so unified (and to explain why probably needs a whitepaper) - Microsoft implements ODF... in a serious and very efficient way. These two factors have changed the battlefield, but one thing they haven't changed is that despite the calculations and hopes that were formed several years ago, the adoption of ODF has not really picked up and is even not directly related to the migrations to LibreOffice. On the other hand, people still don't make the difference between their documents and the office suite they use. I like your ratio above, but only if we have implementations that offer something else than an office suite, meaning that people will see the value of ODF not just for the freedoms they can benefit from, but as well if they see the value in all the different possibilities they can have by choosing the format. Today, this is not happening, even though the ODF ecosystem is alive and growing (albeit slowly). FWIW, the Document Foundation puts emphasis on open standards and has done so since day one in its manifesto: https://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/ Best, Charles. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
On Sun, Dec 01, 2013 14:14:50 PM +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: as you know there was a time when the ecosystem was much stronger and unified to promote ODF. Today, things are very different: - the ODF ecosystem is not so unified (and to explain why probably needs a whitepaper) so true... I too am very unhappy about this. Marco -- M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com http://stop.zona-m.net Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how software is used *around* you -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Le Sun, 1 Dec 2013 16:11:03 +0100, M. Fioretti mfiore...@nexaima.net a écrit : On Sun, Dec 01, 2013 14:14:50 PM +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: as you know there was a time when the ecosystem was much stronger and unified to promote ODF. Today, things are very different: - the ODF ecosystem is not so unified (and to explain why probably needs a whitepaper) so true... I too am very unhappy about this. Marco So am I. But it seems to me we are past the stage where things could revert back to the old days, whatever that means. Best, -- Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder, The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint Mobile Number: +33 (0)6 98 65 54 24. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
LibreOffice as a BRAND is growing stronger every day. It is easily recognized once it has been introduced. When the name was chosen it must have been uppermost in the TDF mindset that they were creating a brand.. Promoting the Brand is surely what matters to all who want to see LibreOffice succeed. All the other aspects such as Format, Groups etc., will benefit as a consequence. The brand, LibreOffice encapsulates all of these. PROMOTE LIBREOFFICE! Tink. -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Formats-failed-marketing-was-Fwd-Cost-of-MS-Office-relative-to-LO-was-Fwd-libreoffice-users-Re-movine-tp4085711p4085957.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
On 01/12/13 14:14, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: Today, things are very different: - the ODF ecosystem is not so unified (and to explain why probably needs a whitepaper) Unfortunately, the largest company in the ecosystem is now focused on other objectives, and has been instrumental in splitting the ecosystem (and keeping it divided, in a way which makes it probably impossible to reunite). - Microsoft implements ODF... in a serious and very efficient way. We should be more effective in leveraging MS ODF support, though. -- Italo Vignoli - italo.vign...@gmail.com mob +39.348.5653829 - sip/jabber it...@libreoffice.org skype italovignoli - hangout/jabber italo.vign...@gmail.com -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Hi :) I think the largest company in the eco-system is beginning to be TDF! IBM is larger but it doesn't seem to want to be a big name in office desktops. Does the ODF Alliance still exist? Their website seems to be dead or perhaps just very out-of-date. Perhaps people from TDF could get involved in updating it? Perhaps Apache might be interested in giving it a boost too? Perhaps it's just that it's main reasons for existence are over now? OASIS is a LOT more lively. Last i heard there were some (or at least 1) people from TDF involved in that. Also there seems to be TDF people involved in FSF (or is it FSF people involved in TDF?). Anyway, either way is good. Regards from Tom :) On 1 December 2013 16:40, Italo Vignoli italo.vign...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/12/13 14:14, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: Today, things are very different: - the ODF ecosystem is not so unified (and to explain why probably needs a whitepaper) Unfortunately, the largest company in the ecosystem is now focused on other objectives, and has been instrumental in splitting the ecosystem (and keeping it divided, in a way which makes it probably impossible to reunite). - Microsoft implements ODF... in a serious and very efficient way. We should be more effective in leveraging MS ODF support, though. -- Italo Vignoli - italo.vign...@gmail.com mob +39.348.5653829 - sip/jabber it...@libreoffice.org skype italovignoli - hangout/jabber italo.vign...@gmail.com -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Hello everyone, Le Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:22:32 +, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk a écrit : Hi :) My thought is that we need to promote 1. LibreOffice first 2. other programs that can use the format as their native format 3. the format 4. the community 5. the fact that even MS Office's most recent versions can read/write the format too now 6. ethical issues In roughly that order. I don't think people who need to write letters are always particularly interested in anything other than just finding a program that can do the job. The marketing team have decided to promote the community as the product that people buy into (for free) but i think a lot of people will continue to see the product as being the program. I think they are going to confuse people with their current policy. I don't think it's wrong to promote the community or the format but from what i have seen people try the program first and then sometimes find those other things are an extra benefit. Tom, you're making some good points above, but I think that we may not be talking about the same thing. As a member of the marketing team, I cannot just say that we should stop promoting the product or rather the software as you rightly call it. I don't think we ever will. But when we are pushing to advocate the community this strategy exists because of specific goals and because we know that LibreOffice, as a software and as a product, cannot be marketed as an off the shelf product or even a traditionalsoftware. When you go down the path of productivising a software that's open source and developed by a community, you either do this because the software fulfills some very specific needs and some very specific niche, or you don't, because just like LibreOffice, you have twenty different kind of audiences, a whole set of complex or simple features appealing to, well, pretty much the entire planet, and that there can be no question of product positioning because you simply don't have enough funds and because the software caters to the needs of millions of people, businesses and governments. I've used some marketing terms here intently. But the point is that we have decided to shift the focus to community promotion, but not to forget about promoting software, keeping in mind that 1) nobody reads the release notes 2)the users' needs tend to be evolving over time 3) the financial dept wants to use their macros 4) we won't engage in endless pseudo marketing discussions such as how should we position LibreOffice? 5) it should be a fun thing to do anyway. Promoting the format alone doesn't seem to work. People have immense trouble finding File - Save As ... It's tooo geeky for a lot of people. They click on the Save button and have no idea where it's being saved or what format it's in. Windows hides the format for all file-types by default so very few people understand anything about formats. Yes that's true. Open Standards are crucial; however, good luck explaining this to the large majority of people who think a word document is MS Word the software. Promoting the software alone doesn't work either. Although, to be fair, it is going a LOT better under TDF than it went under Sun. Sun seemed reticent about promoting OOo in the USA, England and possibly other countries that have English as the supposedly dominant language. Under TDF LibreOffice is becoming more widely known about. Unlike Sun, TDF is managing to get into fairly mainstream articles in fairly mainstream press. So it's really Sun's total lack of advertising and promotion that had been holding OOo/LO/AOO back for the first decade. Rather than choosing a wrong direction they chose NONE and that is what led us nowhere. Thanks for the nice words here but I think that it's probably more complex than that; and I am not alone thinking we must do much more in these geographies. As LibreOffice usage rises so does usage of the format. But usage of the format follows. It doesn't lead the way. Most of us started by trying to stick with MS formats, perhaps even setting the defaults to MS formats (i did that). After a while each of us begins to realise that it's not the optimum format and so we gradually change to keeping originals in ODF and only using MS ones to share with outsiders. Soon we are going to be able to use ODF to share with outsiders. Three years ago some people would write to this list or comment under articles to say that LibreOffice didn't have something they wanted so they would have to return to MS Office. A tad irksome because we would often find the functionality did exist or that same end-result could be obtained by some more efficient route. Those few people had just found it easier to spend more time registering and writing a grumble rather than bothering to spend any effort looking up how to do the task. Nowadays people write in to apologise that they have had to return to
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Hi, This topic may go deeper but i would loke to say that we are not a company product. It's freesoftware. I have been in freesoftware communities for 7 years and the following basic principle is always working: Good community leads to good software. Good community with a good software leads to higly satisfied users who will act as militants of the 'product' and you cannot have that promotion with money. Proactive members will always push people, government organizations and private companies to use it. If community slows, everything will be turned upside down. I think many of us had been experienced with different 'dead' projects. I really appreciate the 'Community First' marketing policy. All other things are complimentary and 2.order stuff. The hardest thing is building a community and keeping its growth. Best regards, Zeki -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Hi :) The main points i was making are that 1. It has NOT been 13 years of failure due to marketing the software. Most of that time the marketing (in the US and England) has been minimal or non-existant. Under TDF that changed. So it's only really valid to talk about the last 3 years rather than the last 13. In the last 3 years there has been a lot of success. 2. Marketing the format instead of marketing the software is unlikely to get anywhere. People who write a letter almost never know what format it's in and they don't care. At best they might say Word format as though there is only one and that one doesn't change. On this list we all know that is very far from the truth because we see the result of that more often than most other mailing lists. It's interesting about expanding the we to include other organisations and governments. If each organisation did do a little to promote the format, perhaps placing it 3rd or 4th in their list of priorities, then it would do a LOT to get the format much more widely recognised. Possibly more recognised than any of the individual organisations pushing it. I was only thinking of the 1 organisation, TDF. Plus i was only thinking of the number 1 spot of what gets promoted. Inevitably 2 or 3 other things get mentioned along the way even if it's just as side issues. Regards from Tom :) On 30 November 2013 10:38, Charles-H. Schulz charles.sch...@documentfoundation.org wrote: Hello everyone, Le Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:22:32 +, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk a écrit : Hi :) My thought is that we need to promote 1. LibreOffice first 2. other programs that can use the format as their native format 3. the format 4. the community 5. the fact that even MS Office's most recent versions can read/write the format too now 6. ethical issues In roughly that order. I don't think people who need to write letters are always particularly interested in anything other than just finding a program that can do the job. The marketing team have decided to promote the community as the product that people buy into (for free) but i think a lot of people will continue to see the product as being the program. I think they are going to confuse people with their current policy. I don't think it's wrong to promote the community or the format but from what i have seen people try the program first and then sometimes find those other things are an extra benefit. Tom, you're making some good points above, but I think that we may not be talking about the same thing. As a member of the marketing team, I cannot just say that we should stop promoting the product or rather the software as you rightly call it. I don't think we ever will. But when we are pushing to advocate the community this strategy exists because of specific goals and because we know that LibreOffice, as a software and as a product, cannot be marketed as an off the shelf product or even a traditionalsoftware. When you go down the path of productivising a software that's open source and developed by a community, you either do this because the software fulfills some very specific needs and some very specific niche, or you don't, because just like LibreOffice, you have twenty different kind of audiences, a whole set of complex or simple features appealing to, well, pretty much the entire planet, and that there can be no question of product positioning because you simply don't have enough funds and because the software caters to the needs of millions of people, businesses and governments. I've used some marketing terms here intently. But the point is that we have decided to shift the focus to community promotion, but not to forget about promoting software, keeping in mind that 1) nobody reads the release notes 2)the users' needs tend to be evolving over time 3) the financial dept wants to use their macros 4) we won't engage in endless pseudo marketing discussions such as how should we position LibreOffice? 5) it should be a fun thing to do anyway. Promoting the format alone doesn't seem to work. People have immense trouble finding File - Save As ... It's tooo geeky for a lot of people. They click on the Save button and have no idea where it's being saved or what format it's in. Windows hides the format for all file-types by default so very few people understand anything about formats. Yes that's true. Open Standards are crucial; however, good luck explaining this to the large majority of people who think a word document is MS Word the software. Promoting the software alone doesn't work either. Although, to be fair, it is going a LOT better under TDF than it went under Sun. Sun seemed reticent about promoting OOo in the USA, England and possibly other countries that have English as the supposedly dominant language. Under TDF LibreOffice is becoming more widely known about. Unlike Sun, TDF is managing to get into fairly mainstream
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
about formats. for european users, they should know that the european law imposes the usage of the same data sructures and formats for every public administration in the continent. they concluded that the only one solution is using open formats. worth noting that ms adopted a kind of xml data format, but it is clearly not an open format (they try still to lock people inside their data formats, see the problems when you try to open a docx file). as I see in the italian experience, many municipalities, regional government and universities are moving to open source software (last but not least for budget problems) and libreoffice is slowly becoming a success (a good news, because it can be a new standard to replace ms office), but there are still resistances (even from vendors, system administrators, users). many people are not aware of the things success cases, contributions, comments could be more known. is there still a multi platform installation dvd ? On Saturday, November 30, 2013 1:40 PM, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Hi :) The main points i was making are that 1. It has NOT been 13 years of failure due to marketing the software. Most of that time the marketing (in the US and England) has been minimal or non-existant. Under TDF that changed. So it's only really valid to talk about the last 3 years rather than the last 13. In the last 3 years there has been a lot of success. 2. Marketing the format instead of marketing the software is unlikely to get anywhere. People who write a letter almost never know what format it's in and they don't care. At best they might say Word format as though there is only one and that one doesn't change. On this list we all know that is very far from the truth because we see the result of that more often than most other mailing lists. It's interesting about expanding the we to include other organisations and governments. If each organisation did do a little to promote the format, perhaps placing it 3rd or 4th in their list of priorities, then it would do a LOT to get the format much more widely recognised. Possibly more recognised than any of the individual organisations pushing it. I was only thinking of the 1 organisation, TDF. Plus i was only thinking of the number 1 spot of what gets promoted. Inevitably 2 or 3 other things get mentioned along the way even if it's just as side issues. Regards from Tom :) On 30 November 2013 10:38, Charles-H. Schulz charles.sch...@documentfoundation.org wrote: Hello everyone, Le Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:22:32 +, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk a écrit : Hi :) My thought is that we need to promote 1. LibreOffice first 2. other programs that can use the format as their native format 3. the format 4. the community 5. the fact that even MS Office's most recent versions can read/write the format too now 6. ethical issues In roughly that order. I don't think people who need to write letters are always particularly interested in anything other than just finding a program that can do the job. The marketing team have decided to promote the community as the product that people buy into (for free) but i think a lot of people will continue to see the product as being the program. I think they are going to confuse people with their current policy. I don't think it's wrong to promote the community or the format but from what i have seen people try the program first and then sometimes find those other things are an extra benefit. Tom, you're making some good points above, but I think that we may not be talking about the same thing. As a member of the marketing team, I cannot just say that we should stop promoting the product or rather the software as you rightly call it. I don't think we ever will. But when we are pushing to advocate the community this strategy exists because of specific goals and because we know that LibreOffice, as a software and as a product, cannot be marketed as an off the shelf product or even a traditionalsoftware. When you go down the path of productivising a software that's open source and developed by a community, you either do this because the software fulfills some very specific needs and some very specific niche, or you don't, because just like LibreOffice, you have twenty different kind of audiences, a whole set of complex or simple features appealing to, well, pretty much the entire planet, and that there can be no question of product positioning because you simply don't have enough funds and because the software caters to the needs of millions of people, businesses and governments. I've used some marketing terms here intently. But the point is that we have decided to shift the focus to community promotion, but not to forget about promoting software, keeping in mind that 1) nobody reads the release notes 2)the users' needs tend to be evolving over time 3) the financial dept wants to use their
Re: Formats failed marketing, was: Fwd: Cost of MS Office relative to LO, was: Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Re: moving to new version of MS Office
Hi :) As far as i know there are 2 projects producing multi-platform installers on Dvd but only English and German languages https://www.libreoffice.org/download/ I'm fairly sure there must be ones in other languages. I can't believe Brasil hasn't got one (for example)! A little earlier in the thread someone mentioned that OpenOffice had several in several different languages. My guess is that those were done by local volunteers, possibly with the help of local users groups. Those are probably done for LibreOffice now, or for both. It's unlikely (but possible) that they stuck with just OpenOffice. So, if you can contact the Italian Local User Group then you might be able to prod someone there into giving better information. Regards from Tom :) On 30 November 2013 20:04, Paolo Debortoli paolo_debort...@yahoo.com wrote: about formats. for european users, they should know that the european law imposes the usage of the same data sructures and formats for every public administration in the continent. they concluded that the only one solution is using open formats. worth noting that ms adopted a kind of xml data format, but it is clearly not an open format (they try still to lock people inside their data formats, see the problems when you try to open a docx file). as I see in the italian experience, many municipalities, regional government and universities are moving to open source software (last but not least for budget problems) and libreoffice is slowly becoming a success (a good news, because it can be a new standard to replace ms office), but there are still resistances (even from vendors, system administrators, users). many people are not aware of the things success cases, contributions, comments could be more known. is there still a multi platform installation dvd ? On Saturday, November 30, 2013 1:40 PM, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Hi :) The main points i was making are that 1. It has NOT been 13 years of failure due to marketing the software. Most of that time the marketing (in the US and England) has been minimal or non-existant. Under TDF that changed. So it's only really valid to talk about the last 3 years rather than the last 13. In the last 3 years there has been a lot of success. 2. Marketing the format instead of marketing the software is unlikely to get anywhere. People who write a letter almost never know what format it's in and they don't care. At best they might say Word format as though there is only one and that one doesn't change. On this list we all know that is very far from the truth because we see the result of that more often than most other mailing lists. It's interesting about expanding the we to include other organisations and governments. If each organisation did do a little to promote the format, perhaps placing it 3rd or 4th in their list of priorities, then it would do a LOT to get the format much more widely recognised. Possibly more recognised than any of the individual organisations pushing it. I was only thinking of the 1 organisation, TDF. Plus i was only thinking of the number 1 spot of what gets promoted. Inevitably 2 or 3 other things get mentioned along the way even if it's just as side issues. Regards from Tom :) On 30 November 2013 10:38, Charles-H. Schulz charles.sch...@documentfoundation.org wrote: Hello everyone, Le Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:22:32 +, Tom Davies tomdavie...@yahoo.co.uk a écrit : Hi :) My thought is that we need to promote 1. LibreOffice first 2. other programs that can use the format as their native format 3. the format 4. the community 5. the fact that even MS Office's most recent versions can read/write the format too now 6. ethical issues In roughly that order. I don't think people who need to write letters are always particularly interested in anything other than just finding a program that can do the job. The marketing team have decided to promote the community as the product that people buy into (for free) but i think a lot of people will continue to see the product as being the program. I think they are going to confuse people with their current policy. I don't think it's wrong to promote the community or the format but from what i have seen people try the program first and then sometimes find those other things are an extra benefit. Tom, you're making some good points above, but I think that we may not be talking about the same thing. As a member of the marketing team, I cannot just say that we should stop promoting the product or rather the software as you rightly call it. I don't think we ever will. But when we are pushing to advocate the community this strategy exists because of specific goals and because we know that LibreOffice, as a software and as a product, cannot be marketed as an off the shelf product or even a traditionalsoftware. When you go down the path of
