Google Adwords - not sure if off-topic

[Nelson Marques]

On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 18:05 -0500, inode0 wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Nelson Marques <07721 at ipam.pt> wrote:
> >
> > ... snip lots of interesting stuff ...
> >
> > * About Marketing itself:
> >
> > "Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain
> > what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and
> > value with others" - Philip Kotler
> >
> >  The process of exchanging products and value has nothing to do with
> > "monetary units". I'm not quite sure why everyone tries to place $stash
> > there.
> >
> >  Applying that to Fedora, Marketing should realize on what Fedora users
> > want and provide them a product (Fedora Linux) that meets their needs.
> > This will conduct to a recognition of Value on Fedora Linux (product) by
> > our users.
> 
> I'm really not sure that is how I would do the translation to Fedora
> in this case. For most Fedora users the "product" is largely a gift
> where nothing is exchanged..

Nothing is exchanged? Robyn's contribution to Fedora 13 slogan: "Rock
it":

* We provide a zero cost (lets assume it that way) free operating
system;
* Rock it; We provide a experience;
* We provide an alternative;

- We get revenue? No. We get something back? Off course we do; users
recognition for prime engineering software. A contact between the user
and our philosophy. He might not get enrolled with the Fedora Community,
but he is already enrolled with FOSS (and eventually at the very low
level with FEdora) by moment he downloads the software.

I've said this more than once: profit doesn't need to be based on
monetary units (€'s, $US, etc etc). It can be also translated in social
profit (easy to associate with our Foundations).

This is mainly how I see it. There was once a workshop with Nicklodeon's
Marketing Director. He was explaining how he got kidnapped by alliens
and how he learned their numbers. He was making the symbols and telling
us what those numbers where. No one made a damn clue about it and
everyone was thinking that he was a looney. Eventually he pops out with
"out of the box" and soon enough everyone was enlightened. This was a
very amusing experience. This to say, that sometimes we need to think
"out of the box". But most of us are just twisted by our day to day
life. For example, a kid you know around 10 years or a bit older. Give
him a Fedora DVD, explain him what it is (in words he can understand)
and try to get him to say what if he got something that you can consider
as a trade (at 10 he will never become a fedora contributor). But it is
a trade.


>  To see a real exchange we need to look at
> Fedora contributors, not Fedora users. When we give the contributors
> what they want they give back to the project.

Those keep the project alive, for sure. Totally agree, but that doesn't
mean that all the others who don't and only use fedora don't recognize
value in a trade (by downloading our software for instance). Today's
user might be tomorrow's potential contributor. It's up to us Marketing
twisted monkeys to make it happen. My interview with Dan tried to
explore that gap and make an approach to why possible contributors
sometimes don't enroll. 

>From my personal experience and going into another level, this is what
happened (I am not going into much detail because somewhere there are
the NDA's I signed). When I was Portugal Telecom (PT), we used Red Hat
6.0 to deploy a large number of platforms running services to support
our GSM GPRS infra-structure. This was a part of a larger program to get
PT free from very nasty royalties that we were paying mainly to HP, as
most of the crap was actually HP/UX+Hardware powered.

The hardest part was to convince our customer TMN (National Mobile
Telecommunications), the mobile operator from the PT Group to deploy
this platforms and their reliability. We were also changing into IA32.
Their concerns were to ensure a 4 hour service. Everything that could
happen could not take more than 4 hours to solve, hardware or software
wise. We (PT Inovation, the R&D Technology Division from PT Group) would
ensure and make the contract for service support and IBM kicked in for
the hardware (this was also a large contract for them). It was IBM who
convinced them through a small presentation about Linux deployment.
Oracle also had it's role there (and it mainly due to Oracle's
involvement that we went Red Hat, as Oracle 8i back then was important).

You have no idea on how much HP would be loosing in contracts in the
following years (they still have HP stuff, but as technology is upgrade,
it grows thiner).

Did we ever contributed to RedHat or FOSS? No. Some patches we tried to
submit were often turned down by maintainers, mainly because they served
our own purposes and most times were cutting security holes by
eliminating what some called "features". 

This all to say that though we never contributed to FOSS, the ammount of
money involved in those contracts favored IBM and Oracle. Don't they
deploy a huge ammount of money into FOSS? Not for sure because they want
to help us, but because when Linux is considered as an option by some
big fat wallet customers they want to grab those contracts. HP loss many
contracts for the PT Group, other companies like IBM got them (hardware
mainly), and they promoted Linux with us against other proprietary
vendors for the very same contracts. Thats probably why all those
companies want to support FOSS, not only because they like it... they
like because it generates millions of revenue in support contracts. 

This to say... we might not see things as they work in many cases. I
would also take 1 line to say that Red Hat most likely stood up from the
very early against companies that were way more powerful, and they
managed to cut a large part on their proprietary UNIX markets. I do take
my hat for their work in the last 12 years. It's for sure an example to
us all. Benefit is always there even if we don't see it clearly.

If companies like the PT Group wouldn't see a reliable alternative in
FOSS, they were still injecting thousands of millions in proprietary
UNIX's, and maybe proprietary UNIX's vendors weren't injecting so much
in FOSS development like they do nowadays... not because they care about
our users, but because in the huge fat contracts Linux and YOUR
engineering is owning them all.

My personal view and once more, sorry for the wall of text.

Mostly I agree with you, but I see a value recognition in those "trades"
even if the users don't directly contribute to us.

> 
> John