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How Not To Sell Linux Products
An anonymous reader writes "Roblimo looks at why so many Linux products fail in the marketplace, and decides it's not because Linux users want everything free, but because most products they're asked to buy are either poorly marketed or don't work well. He has some good advice for anyone trying to sell stuff to Linux users, except it really applies to *all* computer products, not just Linux." (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.)
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Those are just the few I've interacted with recently. IBM, Sun, JBoss, and Novell are doing a very good job of supporting, marketing, and selling their Linux-based server products. So there are more and more success stories out there.
But, like the article communicates, we need a lot more to get the momentum going on Linux for the masses. Hopefully, large organizations will follow IBM's lead, and small, open-source based project will look to CodeWeavers as excellent examples. We need more of those guys!
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
I remember being really gung ho about Linux and Open Source after trying my first distro: Mandrake 8.0. At that time, Win98SE and WinME were the dominant flavors (WinXP was just starting to come out), and I found that the Mandrake install did a better job of detecting most of my hardware than the MS install.
Eager to support the cause, I plucked down $100 to preorder the Pro version of the upcoming Mandrake distro. "Cool, I'm supporting open source. I'm doing my part," I thought, and I'd even get some of the CD's early for my pre-order. So I ordered, my credit card was charged, and day after day, week after week, no product arrived. And day after day, my emails to the company weren't answered. There were no real announcements anywhere to be seen about what was causing the delay. Finally, after a bit more than a month of this, I finally called the company at my own expense and had my order cancelled. (And even that required quite a run around, as the number listed on Mandrake's site didn't seem to be a direct number, so I had to call a few times to connect with anybody.)
And this is how they treated an eager customer. Hardly the way to treat a paying customer! I sure wouldn't want to run my business this way.
Granted, things are better now, but when your business isn't run like a business, don't expect customers to stick around. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Would it? One of the points of newspeak is to eliminate redundancy-if you have plus, it can be applied to accentuate the negative or positive following word-minus is redundant
More like TiVo. Appliances are where (embedded) linux really shines. Look at the Linksys WPC11/WAP11, CyberGuard, and some appliances that do things on a scale not even attempted in the Windoze world, such as InterIM from Deviant Technologies, and you'll see prime examples of why Linux and other open source technologies are kicking the shiny metal ass of proprietary products.
;-) but there are so many variables involved in making a PC a Linux "product" (OS, office productivity suite, printing, sound, network browsing, etc) that it's probably the worst test imaginable.
Walmart can sell Lindows PC's, and sure, they're interesting, but let's hope that's not what people think of then they think "Linux products". The thing is, despite the candy interface, when you do run into a problem the learning curve is too long.
I've used a Linux desktop exclusively for over a year now, and I'm happy with it, but when I tried to get my wife (a former IT guru) to adopt it it was a total flop. Admittedly, Debian is not your best intro to desktop Linux
Appliances, competing in well-defined niches, are a natural for Linux and they tend to beat their closed-source competitors. THAT'S what I call a "Linux product".
-hp3
When ever you make a product for the general product it is actually fairly hard. And the hard part is not programming the application to do what it needs to do. But to program it in a way that it can be easily upgraded from one version to the next. You have to be sure that you follow good standards for the install, like ./configure; make; make install or package it as a good RPM or for any other package you need. Prevent users from going to threw the Shared Libraries Hell and if you are using some Shared Library that doesn't come with most distributions, then you need to distribute it with your product or at least provide an easy link to the product. As well providing proper documentation and being available to answer problems. The Hard part is getting good BETA Testers, Not just punks who want to be L337 and have the software before anyone else or who are looking for a freebee stable version. But people and a lot of them who will run the software threw its paces and actually try to brake the program. And do this for a long time at least for 2 or 3 months.
Many times starter companies are unaware of all the extra issues, that are needed to make applications used for the general use. A lot of time they were making custom apps for customers and installing it themselves on their system. Or they are just out or still in college trying to make it big without much experience. So they focus on the program and forget about the need for the general person to install the product. And use it as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Does anyone remember the fiasco with Corel's Wordperfect. I started using wordperfect before MS word was around, in the good old DOS days (sarcasm). I liked Wordperfect a lot, and stayed with it as much as I could, even through all the changes in ownership and the destructive "enhancements".
I was very excited to hear that Corel would port it to Linux. I was a little weary of the Wine hooks they said, but I would give it a try. I paid over $80 for it and what a piece of crap that was. It would constantly crash and I would always be losing data. It would sometimes crash when I tried to save, and the save would lose data or just corrupt the entire file. I finally gave up with it and bought Star Office.
Then, later when Corel gave up on Linux, I read that Corel is an example that you can't make money porting to Linux. I was so angry at reading that, since the real answer was that you can't make money porting shit to Linux. I think Corel expected the "we are doing you a favor" reaction and everyone would buy it. It actually worked with me since I did go ahead and buy it, but I wouldn't buy something else after that unless I knew it worked. I've seen Star Office previously in action, and that was why I later bought it.
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind