[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

Thu Sep 30 15:34:26 CEST 2010

+Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 13:21:04, Graham Lauder a écrit :
+> Our principle competitor, MS competes against the Linux universe as a whole 
+> but other distros compete for the MS user base aimed at particular 
+> Demographics. For instance: 
+> OpenSUSE aims at the "Power User" Market   
+> Ubuntu aims at the young individual end of the market
+> CentOS at Community enterprise and Not For Profits
+> Fedora at the Computing Professional
+> 
+> Mageia could therefore aim at the Young Married professional market, being the 
+> Distro that could be installed on the home computer and geared so that the 
+> whole family could use it.
+
+I don't know whether I agree or not, but I would like to point out that to me Mandriva is/was et Mageia will/could be a generalist distribution.
+
+Which means :
+- suitable for power users (if one can count me in this category, Mandriva is my desktop of choice)
+- suitable for your individuals (My young brother uses Mandriva Linux)
+- suitable for community enterprise and for professionnal actors (We've got more than 400 Mandriva Free servers in production in french hospitals, and several workstations here)
+
+I know there is a difference between saying that the distro is "suitable" for something and its marketing targeting , but I still remember people telling me "Mandriva is a distro for newbies, not for power users or businesses". I want to avoid this at all prices. 
+
+If I were to choose right now, I would say  : advertise Mageia as a generalist distro suitable for many needs just like Mandriva is/was, and then have specific compaigns to highlight some specific usages : in educationnal fields, server usage, workstation usage, etc.
+
+Regards
+
+Samuel Verschelde
+
+