[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[Graham Lauder]

On Friday 01 Oct 2010 07:41:01 Michael Scherer wrote:
> Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 à 22:05 +0800, Kira a écrit :
> > "A distribution for Newbie" is good, but I think what Graham said is
> > better.
> 
> Well,
> saying "a distribution for newbies" is not as good as it sound.

Kira is being positive and you have spent the rest of the mail arguing a way 
to agree with her.  :)

But thanks anyway for the reinforcement 

> 
> If you market the distribution so people think "if you are a newbie, use
> this distro", people will think "he use this distribution so he is a
> newbie". This will drive knowledgeable peoples away to others
> distribution, because they will feel they will learn more by using
> another distro ( which is wrong ) and because others peoples will appear
> as more knowledgeable when they use a distro that is not aimed at
> newbies.
> 
> In turn, this mean a diminution of the global expertise in the
> community. Less expert users to answer to support, less experts users to
> report bug, fix packages, create softwares or contribute, and to
> basically teach to new users how to be good community member resulting
> in less quality, and a less sustainable community.
> 
> Apple does it correctly. They never say "we target newbie users".
> See http://www.apple.com//why-mac/
> "better computer" "most advanced os" "award winning support" "latest
> technology" "software you love".

Neither are we saying that, in fact what we would possibly be saying is 
"Mageia has the tools to allow your Genius (tm) to achieve their place in the 
world" or something of that nature.  What you are talking about is an 
advertising approach not a marketing demographic and so is somewhat premature

We haven't stated how we would approach the market only that we identified 
this as a possible target. 

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