[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

Fri Oct 1 14:14:36 CEST 2010

I'm not sure what's going on with this ML.  I responded to a post by
+Graham Lauder, and it ended up going to him but not the ML.  He then
+responded to me privately, and we both agreed to repost to the ML. 
+According to the gmane archives, he did, but I never received his
+repost, so I can't place my reply in the correct branch of the thread. 
+I'll post it here, just so that it's *somewhere* in the thread...
+
+Graham Lauder wrote:
+> 42 for me, I started with NCR in August of 1968 and went on to be MD of my own 
+> company for eighteen years, these days retired on my little country estate, 
+> wonderful lifestyle, bloody awful internet connection.  :)
+>   
+Congrats, we're both old farts :-)
+> And this is not economics this is Marketing 101  
+>   
+
+No, sorry, it's not marketing when you frame it as you did:
+
+> We do this because at the end of the day infrastructure costs, marketing 
+> > costs, a whole pile of things cost.  One day some patch or application, which 
+> > is essential but completely non-sexy could require us to pay a dev on contract 
+> > and so on and so forth. 
+
+That's economics, pure and simple.  Marketing is trying to make
+something attractive to potential purchasers.  A distro doesn't have any
+of those.
+
+>
+>> You make my point exactly.  The infrastructure costs are fixed, and the
+>> donor pool will be larger if the user base is larger.  
+>>     
+>   
+>> [....]  If MDV had trumpeted itself as a KDE-only Family (or Education,
+>> or whatever) distro, and reinforced that by excluding packages and
+>> infrastructure support for other stuff, I wouldn't have given a dime.
+>>     
+> And you miss my point entirely, there is NO trumpeting, that's advertising, 
+> there is no exclusion, rather inclusion of a missed market
+>   
+
+Oh, come on.  Trumpeting and advertising are essentially the same thing,
+at last in the context of this discussion.  And what you're advocating
+is certainly exclusion; you're saying that we should design and promote
+the distro as a <fill-in-the-blank> distro in order to capture the
+mindset of a specific market share, to the implicit exclusion of other
+aims if resource limitations encroach.
+> I'm a marketing guy not a hacker and I haven't been part of the marketing of 
+> OBS, but I seem to remember that OBS packages for a whole heap of distros 
+> including even deb based ones. However I may be wrong talk to Jos Poortvliet 
+> or Andreas Jaeger on the opensuse lists
+>   
+
+OK, then maybe we need to look at piggybacking on OBS.  The idea I
+floated was an idea, with a suggestion of an implementation.  If there's
+a better implementation, that's fine; we can use it. 
+
+>> "Focus" is all about excluding "non-essential" activities so that a
+>> company can focus its limited resources on the desires of a specific
+>> market. 
+>>     
+> Focus in this case is about establishing branding, nothing else
+>   
+
+You're entitled to your definition, as I am mine.  In common parlance
+(as well as in this industry) "focus" (as used by non-developers) very
+definitely implied "concentrate on this and not that".  That not
+branding; it's triage and prioritization.
+
+> I am wondering why you are trying to convince me, this is not my decision, I 
+> am merely an idea generator.  I give reasons as to why I believe that this 
+> target market is a good one and I foster debate.  My goal is simply to 
+> establish criteria for branding, nothing else right now.
+>   
+
+I'm not sure how seriously to take this.  You post an opinion about
+channeling the distro to a specific audience, and when I respond, you
+wonder why I'm trying to convince *you* ?  Frankly, I doubt if I *could*
+convince you, and it was never my intention to try.  I know an
+enthusiast when I read one.   I'm simply participating in the debate you
+initiated and want to foster.  Which includes the issue of whether we
+need branding at the distro level or not. 
+
+My opinion is that we do not.  Our infrastructure costs will be
+relatively fixed, and will be dwarfed by the cost of developer and other
+contributor time it will take to maintain Mageia.  The community
+resources we will discourage by advertising ourselves as a niche distro
+will cost us much more than the infrastructure budget.  So, while I
+would concede that your branding argument would make sense if we were
+embarking on a commercial venture, I'd have to say that it is pretty low
+on the priority list for a community distro.
+