Am 09.04.2014 10:02, schrieb Jean-Marc Lasgouttes:
09/04/2014 00:35, Uwe Stöhr:
I started this thread for various reasons, one of the main reason is
that I miss a concept for LyX and the 2.1 release. What is our plan
for advertisement, when do we think it is a good time to release, who
of the press people do we ant to inform, what do we think is our
market scientific-only, schools, business usage, .... According to
our decision we can develop a small campaign.
For some releases, we had a small "PR" team. That was good, but it is
not something that was decided by a committee at release time. This work
is begun when one feels that the release is looming. This time, we don't
have it.
Hi JMarc,
the problem here is again bad communication. I am pretty sure that we could have got some LyX users
to help us here but we never asked them.
We don't sell LyX, sure, but it is nevertheless a product. Developing a product is just one part
marketing is as important as support and development. What does it help us when we add the next
feature for a very small user group when most of the people don't use LyX. I wrote you that LyX is
forbidden in many companies and even universities. Also at my university time I _HAD TO_ transform
my scientific papers to MS Word to be able to submit them to some chemistry scientific journals.
They explicitly denied LaTeX.
PR is just another feature of a release. Just as we cannot decide in
advance who is going to develop what feature, we cannot force anybody to do PR.
You mention an important point: We don't have a development plan. What do many customers need and
what does only please us developers? We never did a user survey on our webpages and the lists.
For example I use math ad chemistry equations almost daily and it would be fun to add support for
all \xarrow commands in math. But who will use this feature except of math experts?
From the feedback I got it seems that for average users the most useful feature of LyX 2.1 is the
table row/column shifting feature. So instead of implementing support for \xarrow it would make more
sense to work on the table feature so that it for example also works on a cell base (not only for
complete rows and columns). The import of table from Word and webpages also seems to be a useful
feature for average users.
You see, with a development plan we can focus our work on what many needs instead of adding this and
that which might only please us extremely experienced users. I will open a new thread for this.
I mean every country has its own specialties and with a strategy who
we want to address and how we will find a suitable release date.
Hmm, I see it coming... A different release date for different countries.
No, definitely not. maybe you laugh at me but you have never launched a product, right? Why do you
think companies spend as much money for the release marketing as for the whole development of a
product? There are many people involved and th release date is a very important if not the most
important issue. If your main market is Europe, you will for example not launch a product in August
where about 50% of the customers are in vacation.
However, as we released LyX 2.1 after Easter it was possible to get mentioned in Germany's largest
computer magazine:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Freie-LaTeX-Umgebung-LyX-2-1-erschienen-2178581.html
(they write that LyX is also running user OS/2. I haven't told them this and already wrote them to
correct this if possible.)
regards Uwe
