[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

Fri Oct 1 03:03:32 CEST 2010

On Friday 01 Oct 2010 14:50:52 Frank Griffin wrote:
+> Graham Lauder wrote:
+> > In a phrase: Horse Doo doo
+> 
+> [....]
+> 
+> > Mageia has a donation system
+> 
+> [....]
+> 
+> > 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.
+> > 
+> > Now our problem is that in these days of "everything free off the
+> > Internet" getting Koha is problematic. However there is, obviously, a
+> > proportion of the market that is willing to give Koha.  That proportion
+> > in a market is generally but arguably fixed, so the bigger the market
+> > the greater the Koha.  Our advantage is that our "costs" vary little
+> > with the size of the market.
+> 
+> I'm not exactly ignorant of Economics 101, having been in this business
+> (on the commercial side) for about 35 years.  :-)
+
+42 for me, I started with NCR in August of 1968 and eventually 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.  :)
+
+And this is not economics this is Marketing 101  
+
+> 
+> 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
+
+> 
+> > There is already a way of doing that, it's called OBS (OpenSUSE Build
+> > service, it's free software, install it or in fact use it) and with that
+> > and SUSE Studio, OpenSUSE have that corner of the market targeted and
+> > nailed.
+> 
+> Except that they don't have the tools that we have.  The software
+> packages are common to every distro.  The tools aren't.  The key to
+> whether someone would use OBS or ours (or even OBS ported to use our
+> packages) is the quality of the packages (currency, stability) and the
+> quality of the distro tools.
+
+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
+
+> 
+> "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
+
+[....]
+
+
+> Cheers,
+> Frank
+
+Cheers
+GL
+-- 
+Graham Lauder,
+OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
+http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
+
+OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
+
+INGOTs Assessor Trainer
+(International Grades in Open Technologies)
+www.theingots.org
+