[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[Graham Lauder]

On Friday 01 Oct 2010 14:50:52 Frank Griffin wrote:
> Graham Lauder wrote:
> > In a phrase: Horse Doo doo
> 
> [....]
> 
> > Mageia has a donation system
> 
> [....]
> 
> > We do this because at the end of the day infrastructure costs, marketing
> > costs, a whole pile of things cost.  One day some patch or application,
> > which is essential but completely non-sexy could require us to pay a dev
> > on contract and so on and so forth.
> > 
> > Now our problem is that in these days of "everything free off the
> > Internet" getting Koha is problematic. However there is, obviously, a
> > proportion of the market that is willing to give Koha.  That proportion
> > in a market is generally but arguably fixed, so the bigger the market
> > the greater the Koha.  Our advantage is that our "costs" vary little
> > with the size of the market.
> 
> I'm not exactly ignorant of Economics 101, having been in this business
> (on the commercial side) for about 35 years.  :-)

42 for me, I started with NCR in August of 1968 and eventually went on to be 
MD of my own company for eighteen years, these days retired on my little 
country estate, wonderful lifestyle, bloody awful internet connection.  :)

And this is not economics this is Marketing 101  

> 
> You make my point exactly.  The infrastructure costs are fixed, and the
> donor pool will be larger if the user base is larger.  

> [....]  If MDV had trumpeted itself as a KDE-only Family (or Education,
> or whatever) distro, and reinforced that by excluding packages and
> infrastructure support for other stuff, I wouldn't have given a dime.

And you miss my point entirely, there is NO trumpeting, that's advertising, 
there is no exclusion, rather inclusion of a missed market

> 
> > There is already a way of doing that, it's called OBS (OpenSUSE Build
> > service, it's free software, install it or in fact use it) and with that
> > and SUSE Studio, OpenSUSE have that corner of the market targeted and
> > nailed.
> 
> Except that they don't have the tools that we have.  The software
> packages are common to every distro.  The tools aren't.  The key to
> whether someone would use OBS or ours (or even OBS ported to use our
> packages) is the quality of the packages (currency, stability) and the
> quality of the distro tools.

I'm a marketing guy not a hacker and I haven't been part of the marketing of 
OBS, but I seem to remember that OBS packages for a whole heap of distros 
including even deb based ones. However I may be wrong talk to Jos Poortvliet 
or Andreas Jaeger on the opensuse lists

> 
> "Focus" is all about excluding "non-essential" activities so that a
> company can focus its limited resources on the desires of a specific
> market. 

Focus in this case is about establishing branding, nothing else

[....]


> Cheers,
> Frank

Cheers
GL
-- 
Graham Lauder,
OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html

OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.

INGOTs Assessor Trainer
(International Grades in Open Technologies)
www.theingots.org