[ubuntu-uk] Marketing [Was Re: efi boot, Windows 8 and Linux]

[Paul Sutton]

On 22/09/11 16:11, Alan Lord (News) wrote:
> On 22/09/11 10:50, alan c wrote:
>>
>> The FLOSS world's lack of competence, or even appetite, for publicity
>> or marketing is the elephant in the room.

i don't think we lack competence just the ability to find people who can 
work together to produce a common set of materials and actually keep 
these up to date,  there is some great material out there  but its out 
of date and usually in a format that is hard (for me anyway to edit.

i can show kids my netbook adn tell them about alternatives but unless 
there is a proper support structure out there its going to be hard to 
get them to try it,  as they need help when they need it  even with 
windows floss software.

paul

>> )1) FLOSS, GNU/Linux etc, 'marketing' is pretty well non existent
>> compared to non free products. 'I advertise, therefore I exist'
>> (apologies to Descartes).
>>
>> 2) Of all things, marketing is -very- unsuited to the free libre,
>> distributed model.
>>
>
> It isn't "marketing" per se that's the issue. It is, plain and simply 
> money.
>
> I read an article somewhere several years ago about how much money is 
> spent on advertising/marketing by commercial software vendors. It was 
> something extremely high, like 50% (I think it may have been more) of 
> their entire REVENUE was spent telling people why they should buy 
> their products, and 10% or so was spent on actually making the product...
>
> To market something successfully costs a great deal of money. Free 
> Software, because of how it is produced and delivered, will never have 
> the kind of budgets that MS/Oracle/INSERT VENDOR_OF_CHOICE_HERE have 
> to spend.
>
>
>


-- 
Paul Sutton Cert SLPS (Open)
http://www.zleap.net


17th September 2011 - Software freedom day