SWOT - Comparative Analysis

[Sean DALY]

Nelson, it's great that you are doing this. At Sugar Labs I've been
carrying it around in my head for a year. I was recently persuaded
that this was not the best approach :-) that it was worth the risk to
publish our strategy including SWOT analysis. I'll be doing that soon.

The SL marketing strategy, targeted at teachers (with our limited
means - no advertising budget, so heavy emphasis on PR) is based upon
taking share from the market leader for desktops and netbooks, MS
Windows, by offering an alternative better suited for the education
sector, and particularly in a market (K-6) where the market leading
proprietary offer is weak. We feel that it is natural to compare
GNU/Linux distros in a competitive analysis, but that greater strides
can be achieved by trying to woo teachers from Windows to "other" - in
our case Sugar over GNU/Linux. We struggle against two major barriers
- the unfamiliarity barrier and the installation barrier, both of
which are daunting for nontechie teachers. Sugar on a Stick is our
approach to lowering these two barriers; "does not touch the hard
disk" is one of our central claims. "Boots most anything, runs under
Windows and OSX with virtualization" is another - we know that
classrooms often have old and mismatched hardware, and teachers little
or no say in education IT purchases. Our hope is that teachers will
first see that another way is possible, and from there overcome the
installation barrier.

All that said, if the core target for Fedora is potential
contributors, attacking Windows may not make sense - it may indeed be
preferable to spotlight Fedora compared to other distros.

Sean
Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator


On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 5:12 PM, nelson marques <nmo.marques at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  For SWOT (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/SWOT) and specially to
> comparative Analysis
> (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/SWOT#Comparative_Analysis) I need
> a couple of guidelines, for which I will not decide upon, since I'm not the
> most qualified person to engage or set on stone those.
>
>  I've proposed on the layout the following comparative analysis:
>
>  - Fedora and Ubuntu
>  - Fedora and openSuSE
>  - Fedora and Debian
>  - Fedora and Slackware
>  - Fedora and Arch Linux
>
>
>  To perform this, I'm going to cover 2 things from the marketing
> perspective:
>  1. Marketing Mix
>  2. Communication Mix
>
>  This 2 points I can manage well and there won't be much trouble, but I
> would like to place also some more information on this, something we can
> translate into charts or graphs and that on the end we can actually combine
> them all.
>
>  I was thinking on the following:
>
>  > Ease of Installation (rated in scale, 1-10);
>  > Out of the Box install success in common hardware (mainstream hardware)
>  > Out of the Box security;
>  > Average Time of Installation;
>  > Boot time (power on to GDM login);
>
>  Now, what more should we use to complete it? Factors we can measure in a
> scale from 1-10 and that are relevant in therms of comparison to another
> distros, any more suggestions?
>
> --
> nelson marques
> nmo.marques at gmail.com
>
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