Subject: RE: socks ? on : off
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Feb 08 2001 - 19:58:52 CST
Bill,
We're converging too fast! The libglade thread has been running for what,
30 posts, already? And as soon as we admit that this is a marketing thread,
we'll really scare folks off. ;-)
This is an excellent summary of the adoption decision for our target users,
but I'd still like to find ways to spin this problem into an opportunity.
At 04:10 PM 2/8/01 -0800, WJCarpenter wrote:
>Right, but for the average person, the program to beat is MSWin9x and
>WordPad. WordPad is chump-simple, but it does enough things that
>people new to computers often say things like "I can't believe this
>just give away a program this cool. Aren't they afraid that I won't
>buy their expensive word processor?" Sooner or later, WordPad runs
>out of gas, but it looks just dandy to the newbies.
Yep. At least privately, we should have a checklist which helps make
WordPad look silly in comparison. (I'm not sure we want to publicly
position ourselves w.r.t. WordPad, but it'd be useful to have.) My last
attempt was here:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/March/0402.html
We've come a long, long way since.
>The point is, what are the compelling features that *are* in 1.0 that
>will make AbiWord so cool and useful that someone not only uses it,
>but they convince their friends to use it, they call up strangers in
>the middle of the night and demand they use it, etc?
Excellent question. Anyone who wants to practice their marketing skills
should zero in on how to answer this for various groups of people.
Say we determine that group A covets features 1,2, and 5. And group B
covets only feature 4. That's awesome, because we can then make sure that
each group knows we can meet their needs exactly, with a bunch of other
features as a bonus.
>(It will also be somewhere below the word processors included in the
>$75 office suites of the commercial providers who have been nuked by
>Microsoft already. For some people that's big bucks, but for a lot of
>people, well, you get a nice air-filled box with it and all.)
Oh, it'd be fun to do head-to-head marketing comparisons with them:
depth vs. breadth
fresh vs. stale
nimble vs. bloated
future vs. past
winner vs. loser
etc.
But that seems almost unfair.
>I drink that open source kool-aid you were shouting, or I wouldn't be
>here.
Of course you do. Sorry. Shouting at the choir is a waste of breadth. We
need to send that message outside this community, where shouting may be an
appropriate technique.
>But the average church secretary probably misunderstands it as
>being more like buying from the corner bodega instead of buying from
>the supermarket. You and I (and reviewers) may think of open source
>as a feature of a software product, but the average person does not.
>Reviewers who know all about open source and all that will certainly
>praise AbiWord for its potential, but I think their socks will stay
>on.
Yes. This is clearly our other big marketing challenge. We need to keep
practicing efficient ways to make this message clearer and clearer, and then
repeat it over and over and over and over, until everyone gets it.
My favorite story is about this physicist who would've used Word if it had
overline support, but ... ;-)
>I just think we have to look at 1.0 as a
>beginning. It's a first cut at "par". A description like "blow their
>socks off" is inconsistent with reality.
Yes. 1.0 is a very noble beginning. The end target is Word and beyond, but
I think we all know that. Nobody's claiming we're at that level, yet.
I still believe that a surprisingly large number of people will be excited
about 1.0, and they'll prepare the ground for the even larger set of people
excited about 2.0, etc.
>Your fellow shoeless cobbler...
:-)
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Feb 08 2001 - 21:04:48 CST