Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 09:15 -0600, inode0 wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 8:48 AM, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > On 02/01/2014 09:31 AM, Dan Mashal wrote:
> >>
> >> I for one really don't think that third parties are going to now jump
> >> at the opportunity to create software because we took Gnome and put a
> >> sticker that says "workstation" on it. I'm sorry but I really just
> >> don't see it happening.
> >
> >
> > The products are about a lot more than just slapping superficial labels on
> > things.
> 
> I do think there is an opportunity for the Workstation product to gain
> traction it doesn't currently have as a result of this effort and I
> certainly think Fedora use in the other product areas is virtually
> certain to increase.
> 
> Now to get myself into trouble I would charactize the three new
> products as spins on steroids chosen by the project as worth the
> effort to focus attention on now. The overall effort goes well beyond
> the three new products however and we do need to figure out some
> things that I've not seen discussed that much to this point.
> 
> While the discussion about how we want to treat the existing spins has
> begun I'm afraid it still isn't happening in places that are critical
> to a good decision being made. The desktop spins are heavily used in
> promoting Fedora and have been for years. The folks doing marketing
> and the ambassadors working with end users at events really need to
> have input on this.
> 
> Assuming some of those spins continue to exist for at least the short
> term, that being until we have the new products in the wild and see
> the reaction they generate, how are we going to market this stuff?
> There will be an obvious desire to focus marketing effort on the new
> products but there will be delicate questions about marketing the
> other spins that in some way compete with our own featured products.
> Probably the wrong list for this rambling but we need to start
> thinking about this too if we haven't.

When I went and looked at it yesterday it struck me that this really
isn't a huge issue, because we *already* rather heavily segment our
marketing. If you go to https://get.fedoraproject.org/ , what do you
see? A big blue button for the x64 live image, and some irritating text
you ignore. OK, I exaggerate, but you get the point: we actually already
quite heavily promote one small-p product over all the others. Then
there's a whole bunch of distinctions drawn between all the other
small-p products in a fairly ad hoc way - I think the web design team
actually did the best job they possibly could on this, but it's an
inherently tricky job when we don't have a clear high-level strategy
about what our primary products actually *are*.

So, yes, in the Products world I'm sure we'll promote the Products above
everything else, but then, we already do something even more radical
than that right now...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net