Looking at the marketing plans and strategies of other communities....

Tue Jun 8 21:17:57 UTC 2010

The only thing I believe that might be misunderstand is the therm: "General
Productivity User". Though it's properly defined I believe that everyone
uses different contexts for that very same expression.

Comparing Fedora with openSuSE is strange. openSuSE is most likely one of
the most used in Europe, and though I don't have geographical data to
support this, I would recon most of its users/contributors are located in
Europe, while Fedora seems to be strong in the America's, specially
South/Central America and Asia (India).

Most documents on openSuSE fail to point at least 2 things, that in my
opinion are their strongest point at the moment, and their 'evangelical'
tools:

 #1 - OpenOffice Novell Edition > Please be mindful that this has no impact
on Fedora Community as most people on the defined user base won't have any
interest on this. Though for the the spectrum of users that are not our
target, that is a very powerful weapon to deploy more openSuSE on the field,
specially in Europe smallest economies where most of the corporate tissue
resides on medium/small enterprises. It is also important that with the
European efforts in placing FOSS tools under public administration, that
will become a very potent tool to make up peoples minds. Once more, this has
no impact for the user base that Fedora tries to reach.

#2 - Building Platform > This directly affects us and seems to be ignored.
This happens to be a very real threat to Fedora as it provides very powerful
means for people less skilled technically. The software available through
this platform on openSuSE's repositories is awesome and it might change the
idea most people have on packaging, specially introducing a concept of 'do
it yourself'.

Please do not ignore those 2 things are very approached on a very
superficial way and that on the long might provide a very potent threat to
us. Novell has a very interesting story regarding small niches of market.

>From my understanding which will soon be also available on the SWOT this is
how I would point this:

Fedora > Aims to deploy premier cutting edge technology. At some point it's
a distribution oriented to technology development. I would consider Fedora
as a distribution oriented as a base for another distributions. Fedora
doesn't provide it's own identity on a distro and kicks most of the other
distros in feature availability and software versions. This is interesting
because Fedora seems to be an ever on-going development (which at some point
makes it incompatible with the normal market demands), but on the other hand
it probably it the most rich distro in technological therms.

openSuSE > Aims to deploy premier Production Environment covering many
fields. This is oriented to all users, specially to some very potent market
niches in Europe. Heritage from SuSE and reputation make them a powerful and
competitive distro. openSuSE is a direct threat more to Canonical which aims
to compete in the same league than to Fedora itself. openSuSE finally is
starting to introduce and identity and a brand. For those who don't know
openSuSE, please just consider their -branding- packages which deploy and
ugly theme (Sonar) and some other stuff. Despite it's design is
un-attractive, if improved (and Sonar is the subject of many ports at the
moment, and has probably the most complete sound theme), it can actually
rival Ubuntu and place a decent fight.

I am not sure if we should pay much attention to Novell/openSuSE while we
are both clearly aiming for very different things, specially in user base
therms.

Regarding user base therms, I was aware of the links provided, but not aware
of the triangle. The triangle does support my initial thoughts, there is a
scalling off of the user base based on the degree of knowledge from the
users. The user base defined by Fedora is actually very incompatible with
openSuSE's user base, which eventually does reinforce that openSuSE and
Fedora have way different positioning and stratification of their market
niches.

Actually this is not the right time, but the biggest threat to Fedora isn't
coming from Novell, but instead from Canonical. As it was released later (I
don't have a link), in August Canonical plans to announce their
partnerships/ventures with OEM hardware manufacturers/distributors. If this
happens, I would believe that in the long run, most distributions will be
unable to stop Canonical and their ever growing user base.

I understand that no one gives a damn about such things, but 2010/2012
period might provide Canonical with a slingshot effect on their user base,
if that hasn't happened already. Canonical has a good eye and good Cathedral
Engineering as a distro.

I would recommend people taking more attention to Canonical than exactly to
Novell which only cares about protecting the remnants of their market
niches.

Just a couple of thoughts outside the FOSS world.

"

2010/6/8 John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com>

> Robyn Bergeron said the following on 05/29/2010 10:21 AM Pacific Time:
> > Someone (forgive me, I forget who... sorry!) linked this to me on IRC
> > the other day and I thought it was very cool and interesting - and
> > thought I'd share some of the bits with others.
> >
> > openSUSE has their strategy, SWOT, and industry assessments posted
> > online, openly and transparently (kudos to them!). I think they have
> > done an awesome job thus far.
> > http://en.opensuse.org/Documents
> >
> > They also have a link to the survey they did in February 2010 (8700
> > participants!) - generally surveying who their users are, what they
> > are using linux for, what types of development they do, etc.
> > http://en.opensuse.org/UX/openSUSE_Survey_2010
> >
> > There is also a link to this page: http://www.90-9-1.com/ - which I
> > thought was very interesting, particularly in light of the user base
> > discussions and diagrams that we've all seen. Essentially 90-9-1 dives
> > into (no, no, PLOWS into) these three points:
> >
> >      * 90% of users are the “audience”, or lurkers. The people tend to
> > read or observe, but don’t actively contribute.
> >      * 9% of users are “editors”, sometimes modifying content or adding
> > to an existing thread, but rarely create content from scratch.
> >      * 1% of users are “creators”, driving large amounts of the social
> > group’s activity. More often than not, these people are driving a vast
> > percentage of the site’s new content, threads, and activity.
> >
> > (Incidentally, if you haven't seen the User Base information, I
> > encourage you to do so: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base .  I
> > was also looking for the page that has the user base triangle diagram
> > - does anyone know where that is?)
>
> It turned into a circle,
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Poelstra/What_is_a_target_audience
>
> The original triangle version is still here:
> http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/paste-bin/user-base-v4.pdf
>
> John
> --
> marketing mailing list
> marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org
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>

-- 
nelson marques
nmo.marques at gmail.com
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