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Toy Penguins and Male Egos Drove Linux Acceptance
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's local and city councils have been pioneering the migration from Windows to Linux. Now, one of the IT staff behind one move has revealed how they persuaded workers to accept the changes. Stuffed toy penguins and Linux t-shirts helped to create an open-source love-in at the council offices, and they got a senior chairwoman to demonstrate the new system to the troops. Male ego stopped anyone claiming that Linux was difficult to use, once they'd seen that the 'weaker sex' could master it :)"
To rework a famous old saying, no-one ever went broke overestimating the impact of appealing to the male ego.
That's brilliant marketing to use a female rep to demo a product to a bunch of men.
A lot of companies would do well to follow that example, I think.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Tux toys & t-shirts sound trivial, but they loosen people up about something that a lot of non-tech types think is "hard". Setting up the "sexist" argument ("Even the women can use this OS") is even appropriate if that's what it takes to make decision-makers come around.
<OFFTOPIC>
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
And people wonder where sexism in technology comes from.
Using it to your advantage is not the same thing as working to eliminate it.
I should probably submit this anonymously*, but what the heck.
I don't know if it is in our genes, or if it's a product of our environment, but male ego resulting from male dominance even affects me a ton.
I was running on a treadmill earlier this week, and there was a girl who was running on one next to me at the same time, at roughly the same speed. There was _no_ way I was going to let myself stop before she did--because she was a girl. And I recognized this as I was running.
Seems kind of silly, I know, but that's what was in my head.
*I've heard that posting anonymously at slashdot isn't really, so what's the difference?
...and damned good marketing too.
Somehow it leaves me feeling a little uneasy, though. I bet I'd be influenced by the same or similar tactics, even though I've read this article. It leaves my ego a bit worse for the wear to know that I (hell, we!) am so easily swayed by savvy marketing techniques.
Example: even if janet jackson winds up paying fines for her Super Bowl stunt, I'll bet she gets exactly what she intended in terms of sales and publicity. The people she pissed off were never her customers anyway.
Oddly enough, I recently saw this in Doctorow's "East Coast Tribe", but this was something I learned when I first worked in an IT department.
It doesn't matter if your systems are uber-fast. It doesn't matter if they have a low error rate. It doesn't matter if they are made to be user friendly.
If the users of those systems perceive they are slow, inefficient, hard to use, great, best machines ever - whatever they percieve, that is the reality.
So a good IT staff does two things:
1. Work on their C. I. A. pieces.
2. Work to help the users percieve their systems as being C. I. A. good.
Let's face it - this is why Microsoft is on 90-odd% of all desktop systems out there: people percieve their systems as working, as easy to use, and that everything else is inferior whether that is true or not.
Once you convince them that a Linux or Mac desktop works just as well - if not faster and more securely - on their desk as a Windows box, and that they can use the same kinds of applications, you're set.
I've had IT guys whom I respect greatly tell me they'd love to switch to "OS X", but don't want to because they fear the "learning curve". It's not a "noobie" issue at all - perception clouds everything.
And Brauner made the right calls. To those who had problems, he showed them how it was easy. To those who thought he was being mean, he displayed himself as a "fun guy" with shirts and toys. To those who thought the system was "hard" he showed a secretary doing her job with ease - the person that all my programming teachers taught me to program interface for, since "if a secretary can run it, anybody can".
Excellent work on his part for recognizing that the human element is as important as the technical one at times.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Frankly, I don't want most hardware makers to be writing lots of Linux drivers. I want them to build their stuff to use documented protocols (USB/Firewire/IDE/etc.) correctly so that their hardware Just Works everywhere. That way, I can pick up a piece of new hardware and have it run without any obnoxious CD loading, file downloading or kernel module installation whatsoever.
That's the sort of ease-of-use we should be encouraging.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.