[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[Samuel Verschelde]

Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 13:21:04, Graham Lauder a écrit :
> Our principle competitor, MS competes against the Linux universe as a whole 
> but other distros compete for the MS user base aimed at particular 
> Demographics. For instance: 
> OpenSUSE aims at the "Power User" Market   
> Ubuntu aims at the young individual end of the market
> CentOS at Community enterprise and Not For Profits
> Fedora at the Computing Professional
> 
> Mageia could therefore aim at the Young Married professional market, being the 
> Distro that could be installed on the home computer and geared so that the 
> whole family could use it.

I don't know whether I agree or not, but I would like to point out that to me Mandriva is/was et Mageia will/could be a generalist distribution.

Which means :
- suitable for power users (if one can count me in this category, Mandriva is my desktop of choice)
- suitable for your individuals (My young brother uses Mandriva Linux)
- suitable for community enterprise and for professionnal actors (We've got more than 400 Mandriva Free servers in production in french hospitals, and several workstations here)

I know there is a difference between saying that the distro is "suitable" for something and its marketing targeting , but I still remember people telling me "Mandriva is a distro for newbies, not for power users or businesses". I want to avoid this at all prices. 

If I were to choose right now, I would say  : advertise Mageia as a generalist distro suitable for many needs just like Mandriva is/was, and then have specific compaigns to highlight some specific usages : in educationnal fields, server usage, workstation usage, etc.

Regards

Samuel Verschelde