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.)

Comments

How about some good examples?

[soren42]

There are some examples of good marketing in the Linux arena, but the only one I saw mentioned in the article was StarOffice. StarOffice is an excellent example, but I've come across a few others as we've implemented Linux desktops in our organization.

• CrossOver Office - CodeWeavers has done a great job providing extra features, good support, and overall added value to the wine product that make it worth price. In fact, I liked it so much at work, I shelled out $$$ at home to buy a copy.
• Ximian Desktop 2 - This one is true for two reasons (IMHO) - first, it provides a seamless desktop interface for my corporate users, and second, I'm a Gnome bigot. ^_^ Ximian/Novell has done an excellent job of adding features and value to the out-of-the-box Gnome system, at least for those of us who need the uniformity and features offered by XD2. Also, the promise of future Ximian/SuSE integration with the Novell product line is very enticing.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux - For a corporate Linux distro, Red Hat has done a great job of sales and marketing. I know a lot of people are upset about Red Hat Linux (last incarnated as Red Hat Linux 9) being end-of-lifed, but for a business computing platform, RHEL is a great start.
• WineX - Transgaming offers another great enhancement to wine - good transition of gaming from the Windows platform. Transgaming isn't doing a great job of marketing, but the product features make it worth the purchase.

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!

What about a 3rd aspect: how the business is run?

[macklin01]

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

Re:We demand you delete this article

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Appliances!

[3D0G]

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.

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 ;-) 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.

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

Corel Wordperfect

[nevets]

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.