Support wrote:
From a marketing standpoint, it's all in a name. The problem with some Open
Source products is that they are named by the programmers and geek types
that created them, not by marketing professionals.
Indeed. I wish we had some marketing professionals around to make these
decisions.
Technically oriented professionals are great at the mechanics of
the product but are not necessarily business or marketing people.
Yeah. Adding to that, if all you have is a technical background (hammer)
you tend to treat every problem mechanistically (nail). So you tend to
go over the mechanics of getting posters, sending out press releases etc
but likely miss a whole dimmension to marketing that just isn't part of
your background.
They
choose the names based on logic and their own familiarity with the
environment in which the product is developed without consideration for the
average layman who is not part of that environment and therefore is not
familiar or aware of the terminology or significance of the symbols,
acronyms or names that represent the product they are using.
/daniel nods
For instance. OpenOffice.org 1.1.4. What do those numbers mean? We know. But
ask the average person on the street and chances are he or she hasn't a
clue.
I think that it's good to have version numbers, but they are probably a
bad marketing device (says the techie :) ) unless they are point-oh
releases.
Ask most of them what .org represents. You may get a blank stare.
> Do you realize how many people do not associate the .com or .gov
> or .org extensions to a specific type of web site?
My pastor in the state thought that the .org on a website meant it was a
legal non-governmental organization (e.g. a charity). He picked a .com
domain for the church's website because he thought that was just a
generic internet domain. This is coming from a guy with an engineering
degree :)
Choosing a name for a product is critical to its success in the real world.
A general rule is to keep it short and concise. Make it easy to say and easy
to read.
You have more marketing experience than most people here, so I'm
inclined to trust your judgement. Besides, what you say makes sense. And
it matches my experience (I feel very ackward saying ".org" after saying
"Open Office").
But the Open Source community needs to take
advantage of it before their competition gets wise and develops a strategy
to close them. The product has a new version, a new look and a chance, for
the first time, to actually take the big boys head on. Perhaps it is time
for a name change as well.
I would agree. Now is a good time to change, not when 3.0 comes out.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
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/\/_/ http://opendocumentfellowship.org
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\/_/ I am not over-weight, I am under-tall.
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