SWOT - Comparative Analysis

Thu Jun 17 16:45:08 UTC 2010

I do have a problem with painting other community distributions as 
competition. Yes, we all care about usage etc, but I would never (and have 
never) called it competition.

Competition leads to market share discussions, which in case of freely 
available community distributions is simply the wrong language to use.

IMHO distributions don't "compete" in the typical market sense. It is more a 
way of differentiation, focus and target audience.

Once we compete, we will try to transport the notion of differentiation 
which will not serve the goal of upstream focusing.

This is why I personally do not like the Novell OOo edition - it is 
perceived as a fork, which hurts all.

I would prefer if we stop using the term competition.

Yes, I know this could become a flamewar. I just wanted to point out one of 
the core differences between commercial marketing and community marketing. 
Let's not mix them too much.

As always, I might be wrong.

Jan

  _____

From: marketing-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org 
<marketing-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org>
To: For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user base 
<marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Thu Jun 17 11:45:44 2010
Subject: Re: SWOT - Comparative Analysis

2010/6/17 Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com>

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.

If my work does help you, please feel free to use it and I'm available to 
help with concepts if you wish.
As for sharing the SWOT, you should actually shared your lower level 
strategic documents, such as SWOT, the availability of such shows commitment 
and might attract new investors.

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.

My concern here is that usually market share leaders are everything except 
weak ;) proprietary or not.

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.

I've never tried Sugar, but I've seen some screenshots, and to be honest, 
you guys are doing a great job on the visual identity of Sugar. That's a 
step of differentiation that few dare to give, and honestly I believe you 
are doing it the right way.

As for users and install... most people can't even install windows from a 
normal DVD. For a standalone isntalation, it's probably easier to install 
Linux than just Windows... There are fields in which no one is betting at 
the moment that probably would help you achieving that goal ;) I'll let go a 
quick swift example:

* Are they aware on how a Linux Filesystem is organized ? (This will break a 
lot of barriers, understanding the concepts behind /proc /dev /home /usr... 
and so on. There is no C:! PANIC!

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.

On a personal remark to this... Why compare to other distro's and in why 
grounds will we be making such comparisons ?

My point with the comparison is simple... To demonstrate the real effect of 
'segmentation' and 'positioning' which are two concepts that I believe some 
people really don't understand. Through a comparison it will be easy to see 
such.

I think that to demonstrate the real face of Fedora we should compare it to 
real competitors, this will highlight the true strengths of Fedora, and in 
some ways also the weaknesses, which of course will be at some point reduced 
by the fact of our user base targets.

As a remark, I would also like to leave a note that for most of the media 
approaches of Sugar, I can say your efforts are being taken to a good port. 
I hope everything goes ok... as for the teachers... I would try to 
understand their basic needs... I would recommend something for you to do, 
if not done already before...

Focus Group > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group

This sort of research might help and it does not require expensive 
budgets... in fact you can even approach a school and use it as a pilot for 
this. I'm pretty sure most schools would help and many teachers would 
probably be happy to participate in this. There is actually no need for much 
technical knowledge to run a focus group as in a way it's mainly supported 
by common sense... and it actually should not be technical at all.

My advice would be to gather 10/12 teachers for hour and half / 2 hours and 
have them talking and discussing the subject and the things they would be 
looking for in a product such as Sugar.

nelson

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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-- 
nelson marques
nmo.marques at gmail.com

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