(I probably should have stated the reasoning beehind the idea first) I very much would like OO to succeed and to me success is measured in number of users (both new and converted from competitors). I agree with you that including toolbar is not not good (in fact I dislike it when Y, G stick their stuff everywhere they can), but we badly need some marketing firepower to grow faster.
Without some major promotion we would not get many new users and major promotions cost major money. I see only one way to earn this kind of money - allow somebody to piggyback on us. We are likely to loose some users and allienate some, but hopefully much more will come to us. So we either can play fundamentalism (Stallman-style) and pass good opportunity in the name of being free (also free from customers) or be pragmatic (like Linus Torvalds) and sacrifice a little to gain a lot. And to reiterate the idea - I am not talking about modifying OO in any way, just including somebody's toolbar in installer (like we do for Java). Thanks for reading this far. WBR, K. Palagin. ----- Original Message ---- From: Georg Link <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, February 3, 2007 2:20:44 AM Subject: Re: [Marketing] Including Google|Yahoo toolbars in OO Setup in exchange for promotion? Hello, Kirill Palagin (Y) schrieb: > Hello everybody. > > What do people think of striking a deal with either Yahoo or Google where we > include their toolbar in our setup in exchange for some kind of promotion > with them? > Sun has done this in the past with Java and Google toolbar - > http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-04-2005/0004159637&EDATE=. My personal opinion on the subject is quite clear, I'm against a Google/Yahoo toolbar that is being installed when installing OOo, even with an option that can be disabled. There are definitely good reasons to want a deal like this, we can always need promotion, but I dislike the fact, that I have already enough other installation files where I need to be careful not to install a toolbar. A toolbar is either wanted, than one can go online and install it. Or it is not wanted, than no one should force someone else to install it. Fine, we would not 'force' people to install it, but it gets close to that point. What could be an option is to include a searchbar from Google/Yahoo in Openoffice, so a user can start a websearch from there. It is just an idea of mine, but this way, we don't force anyone to install a toolbar to their browser, and in OOo you can optionally hide this function like all the others. I hope I understood your idea with the toolbar correctly, if not, and maybe your idea was a different one, please let me know. Georg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
