Sure, I don't claim it's a perfect analogy between "their" world and the world of F/OSS. But I think the broad point generalizes well enough to apply to us:
Have *some* differentiating factor that defines why a group of people would find your product more desirable than the other options. If, for us, that is "it's almost like MS Office, but free" and we're good with that, then that's cool. But I kinda think we ought to stretch for something a little more specific, especially given that "almost like MS Office, but free" isn't a unique position. And I'm not proposing any big, elaborate "process" or suggesting we radically change directions (unless we want too!) but rather just saying we could/should spend some time thinking about what makes AOO special. Phil This message optimized for indexing by NSA PRISM On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 1:41 AM, Jörg Schmidt <joe...@j-m-schmidt.de> wrote: > > > From: Pedro Giffuni [mailto:p...@apache.org] > > > The thing about so-called "marketing gurus" is that their assumptions > > about how the markets work may break down when we are talking about > > software that has zero cost. > > > > I will simplify the marketing issue making a bold statement: "We have > > millions of users because we do 80% of what the market leader > > does but > > with 0% of the price." > > > No, the success of free software is not a question of price. > > The development model of free software is something else, but it's not > free. That is not the goal. > > read: > https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html > > Furthermore: > The development and use of OpenOffice is not free, because developers have > to be paid by their companies or donate their own time. Users have cost for > installation, maintenance and staff training. > > The work of Apache is also not free, because Apache needs donations to be > able to work. > > For example see: > https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html > > on: > http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html > > you can see that the sum of the sponsorship is (currently, per year): > > Platinum: 700,000$ > Gold: 320,000$ > Silver: 260,000$ > Bronze: 90,000$ > > > > Jörg > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > >
