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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.)
In "Open Sources," Bob the Red Hat guy responds to the question "how do you make money with free/open source software" with "that makes the assumption that it is easy (or easier) to make money selling proprietary software." (not an exact quote, but it's close enough). I suspect that most software products actually fail in the market place, or atleast will fall into a small niche market. Linux itself is a niche market, and targeting to niche users in an already niche base futher decreases the amount of potential customers. Even if someone has 100% of the Linux market, that's only like, 10% of the total market, with a liberal (not something i am known for) estimation. So i would say taht the real problem with selling to linux users is the selling to linux users. A company is not going to stay afloat vending end-user software only to Linux customers. Even the most sucessful Mac software producers find it necessary to port their stuff to Windows. StarOffice has the ease of instillation and support on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Adding Mac to taht is no issue. I've made it work on FreeBSD without too much hassle either.
A successful linux ISV is going to have to have Windows and/or Mac versions of their product to keep the company with enough revenue in order to offer the product to Linux users because the base simply is not there to keep the company opperational otherwise unless the product is truely groundbreaking, breathtaking, or has 0 competition and no free alternatives (not bloody likely). Just my $0.02. Take it for what it's worth.
One Linux product that I hope is successful is CodeWeavers CrossOver Office.
It's a non-free product that I bought for my debian system, and I've never looked back.
I may get slammed for this, but I really like Microsoft Word 2000 and Excel 2000 (the later products seemed over-featured-- all i need is well made products: like a good grammar checker to correct inevitable typoes)*. Crossover Office allows me to use them seamlessly on my Linux box. I appreciate that quite a lot.
What's more, their version of Wine works really well for a LOT of "unsupported" software-- from character generators for RPGs to "Teach Yourself Chinese" programs.
Getting their product was a snap- paid online, instant download link to the source and to binaries for a variety of distributions.
Good stuff, and, IMHO, a good example of a quality Linux product that I paid for.
*I'm trying to ween myself off Excel to a more robust alternative, but I find the grammar checker of Word very useful for catching critical, but easily overlooked, typoes in technical writing-- I'd miss it a lot. Is there an OSS grammar checker I am un-aware of?
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
I am a relatively new user. I bought it because I was tired of Win98 crashing and couldn't justify XP on my 1.1 MHz Celeron. The thing that had me was that Linux just runs.
OO is great. Mozilla is great. KDE is great. Gnome is OK, but KDE is better (IMHO).
What really stimies me is the difficulty in getting USB devices to work (uncommonly used things like Palm Pilots...) and the general difficulty in either updating or adding new programs to the system once installed.
Want to make Linux sell better? Stop developing the latest/greatest KDE, and start working on fixing these areas. Once fixed (and idiot proofed), you will have a distro that costs $50 instead of $39, but the added cost will be worth it. Market the bullet proof operations, and the fact that linux will run on anything this side of a PC-AT, and probably could run on an AT if you wanted it bad enough. In other words, market it to the soccer moms and busy single parents who can't afford to not have a computer for their kids and yet can't afford to pay $1000 for the P4 and $200 for MS Win XP, and the $450 for the Office suite. (I can see the ad now, two harried moms with computers. One has a Tux sitting next to it and one has a blue screen on it. And the caption is "And I could have spent HOW MUCH less?")
I'll readily admit that I really don't even consider buying software. I don't like spending money when I don't have to (and I don't really like spending money when I do have to!)
I have great operating environments (Linux + GNU and FreeBSD), a great user interface (KDE), great servers (Apache, Postfix, PostgreSQL, etc), and so on. I have no desire to look at non-free options when the free options work so well.
In fact, the only non-free (as in beer) software I have is a bunch of old games. All the Infocom games, lots of Sierra games, Lucas Arts games, old DOS stuff like Duke Nukum 1, etc etc. These can be run through free emulators/virtual machines such as frotz, scummvm, freesci, sarien, dosbox, and so forth. Free games tend to suck (and I'm not talking about piddly arcade games, I'm talking about real games), so I'm willing to pay for good games.
If everyone stopped selling Windows products, and sold Linux products instead, Linux Product Sales would increase.
... by stealing them, instead of buying them.
That's not going to happen -- merchants make too much money selling Windows products.
Only the consumer can stop windows products
-kgj
-kgj
bluesocket is one of the top vendors for business class wireless access points with real security solutions... all based on linux (and according to them, gpl compliant)
;)
btw: i do not work for them, i did talk to the cto
And, no, I should not have used the goddamn Preview mode first.
I'm a sys admin for about 20 Gnu/Linux servers. The reason I don't use proprietory software is, not because the company can't afford it(we certainly don't mind paying programmers to write for us). The the open stuff is so much better because.
./configure
There's nothing like
make
make install
It's so much easier to troubleshoot a missing library or edit some code to fix a problem.
The documentation that comes with proprietary software is usually lacking. But then the most important documentation, the source, is often never available at all.
I'm sorry this guy had such a hard time. But I'd stay away from those all-in-one commercial products. There's a reason why sendmail, samba, apache, etc. have been around so long. They may be diffuclt to install and configure but have infinite flexibility
this hints at the whole reason why opensource has the potential to totally change the computer/it business model. and why so many companies are failing at it.
it's all about product vs. service. since computers have been around the vast majority of companies have been product based. they sell wordprocessors or mainframes or videogames. this makes sense, of course, because the traditional economies have been product-based too. build a widget and sell it. simple.
opensource has the potential to move this to a service based economy. if the product itself is opensource then it is... free. you can't sell it successfully if people can just pluck it off a tree! the response should be to move the money-making into the service area.
okay, maybe "service" is a bad word (since it conjures up the image of low-pay, low-challenge tech support jobs). a better word is "solution". sure there are a lot of companies that claim to be "solution providers" but few really are. the successful companies are the ones that take free software, tailor it, combine it with other free wares, integrate it, document it, deliver it and support it as a unified "solution".
of course a lot of us can roll our own solutions - but a purchased solution can offer a lot of advantages that home-builts can't:
there are some companies that operate on this model. the old red hat did it with rhn and stronghold as just one example.
so. to the opensource companies out there: i have a dozen problems a day and a credit card. sell me a solution! please!
2 1337 4 u!
Its a decent product, yet I've not been able to find it at best buys, circuit city, or anywhere else for that matter. What is wrong with it?
How many Debian, Gentoo, or FreeBSDUSers were former Mandrake or Redhat users?
Yes I realize Mandrake and Redhat or easier to use, but I think largely is its waaayyy to expensive to upgrade distro after distro release to gain the latest versions of KDE, GCC, apache, etc.
I blew probably over $600 since 97 for that reason.
Anyway I only run free as in beer distros.
They are all eternally updating! RPM distro's are not and commerical distro's will always be RPM hell based for depancies. Otherwise no customers would upgrade.
Why should I pay when I can upgrade for free?
That is why Linux products do not sell well. I am tired of paying money and want my stuff for free. Yes I support commercial software as well. But buy_my_latest_distro_Linux is certainly not on my list.
http://saveie6.com/
I agree that naturally loving to code and naturally the best are strongly correlated but commercial environments have many who naturally love to code. I'm one, so is my boss, so is his - yes I am lucky. I've interviewed a bunch of recent college grads for commercial environments and you can easily spot the ones who got into programming because of an inherent interest and those who got into it because a high school guidance councelor said it was a good career choice. The later also contribute to open source projects. It's a simple way to get something onto a resume to be more competitive. For the less talented it can be safer than a coop job through the university, no company to offer a mediocre reference, no mediocre grade on transcript. Yes, some contribute to open source for pure commercial self interest, leverage it to get into a better commercial environment.
In our organization salespeople drive the development process. Whatever we build is directly dependent on what they think they can sell on a given day. This is the way a lot of shops work and I'm not sure it is the best philosophy for delivering a useful, quality product that people are willing to pay for.
1. Photoshop. It is God-like. It is Big. It is (too often) Complex. It is the 900 kilo gorilla. If Photoshop abandoned MacOSx, Apple would be in serious straits... get Photoshop going on Linux and you've got something. And no: Gimp doesn't do it. It's a nice try, but it's just not there yet. I've used it and found it seriously wanting in OH so many ways.
2. InDesign / Quark Xpress. this will require ULTRA reliable drop-dead no-excuses perfect printing capabilities in Linux. Which aren't there yet. It's getting there, but again: not ready for prime time at your local service bureau or the random Epson widget you got for free with your $80 rebate. THEN they'll have to migrate the apps over, and doing that to Quark will be something close to HELL freezing over given the patched and scrambled nature of Quarks underlying engines and code.
3. Dreamweaver. Sure, "real coders" do all their html by hand, but the rest of us do some multiple more work in some GUI like Dreamweaver. Supposedly, Macromedia actually is porting this stuff over to Linux, and if that happens, you can expect Adobe et al to follow suit in the next few years, to prevent MM from owning that market segment.
Now, StarOffice is very good and does a VERY large percentage of what MS Office does. I think that you will see StarOffice grow as other major vendors port stuff to Linux.
Then there's video editing, music creation, audio editing and processing, and that's a whole 'nother smoke.
I do think that as Linux grows, more and more vendors will port to it. It's fairly simply math, and why OSx apps exist. Let's say you have 3% of a market. And the market is of 100 machines. And let's say it takes $3 million to make the app. Do the math. Now, say that you have 3% of a market that is 100 million machines, and your app costs $3 million- the math suddenly get s a lot more attractive. It's just a dollar a machine and you break even.
The same is going on with Linux. As more an more desktop machines are running linux all over the world, the numbers will continue to look more attractive, and major vendors will start sniffing around looking to port to that opportunity.
I think continued effort and some patience are in order.
And if you want to make free (as in beer) apps, fine - go for it. As a user, if they do what I need and do it well and competently, I'm there. But if they don't, (and they too often don't) regardless of platform, I'll cheerfully fork over the green stuff to get my work done. But, I'm not a programmer - I use software and when I need something special, I hire (and pay real money to) a programmer to make it for me. Free is nice, but when you need someone to put their neck on the line for a mission critical work, having the kind of responsibility engendered by reified contracted economic relations ($) is extremely efficient.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Does anyone know what the free software package is?
I often look for software solutions in the open source community, or "semi" open source, like stuff buiilt on PHP/MySQL. Most of the time, I'm lucky if I can even figure out what the damn product does, much less match it to my needs. Basic marketing is so simple I can't understand why bright people can't seem to get the hang of it.
I've got news for all you anti-suit types: Marketing isn't trying to BS someone; it's explaining what your product does, who you've designed it for, and what unique qualities make it better than other choices. GQ's and OB's: Good qualities and owner benefits. If you develop programs and can't do that, you should get a job parking cars or something.
This is not rocket science and it's not hype. It's educating your customer, which is good for the customer and good for you.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
The first product I ever bought for Linux was VMWare, so I could test my Java applications on a Windows platform with relative ease. I think a lot of "cross-platform" type products for Linux would sell quite well. Like a emulator specificly for games, with a guarentee it'll play 99.9% of the Window games on the market. That would be a huge sell.
:) He's very happy to have his KDE interface and Gnome Stones back.
And today I installed SuSE on my machine I'm building for my four year old. I bought the professional version of it for $80 at Best Buy, and was blown away. It was the easiet install of any OS period.
The two manuals are beautiful. It comes with six cd's and a DVD with everything the six dics have. Talk about going out of your way for the customer.
Why Linux for my son? I first had Gentoo Linux on my machine, but had to go back to XP for work related reasons. He hated Windows.
Josh
Before I ran linux, I used Windows at home. All software on the machine was copied from friends.
:)
Before Windows, I used MSDOS. I never bought MSDOS.
Before PCs, I had a Commodore 64. Guess what, I never bought any software for that one either.
Nobody is interested in paying for software, least of all on a platform that is all about free-dom.
I'm not breaking the law anymore.
"Meanwhile, we've found a free software package that is supposed to do the same thing as this unit -- plus act as a print server -- and requires only a minimal computer and a wireless card. We're going to try this method of achieving the same results. It will be scary if free software on a sub-$300 PC is easier to set up than the $1,500 box, won't it?"
Just kinda' curious as something like this may solve a lot of my issues with my small business.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Admittedly, I don't have much experience with purchasing linux products... but if I have to say activestate seems to have their ducks in a row. The product demo of theirs I did try both installed easily, and behaved as advertised. I would be confident purchasing a product from them. Oh, and for the record, I have no affiliation what-so-ever.
I agree with this article. Sort of. The part where he says good products are worth paying for. I reluctantly paid $69 so I could make a last ditch effort at running a couple of Windows only programs without dual booting. (And my experience with WINE has been nothing short of a nightmare.) I made sure my system met the requirements for Win4Lin and then paid for it, downloaded it, and installed.
... again ... realism.
Very uneventful, it just worked. My "test" system (Mandrake 9.2) had a kernel premade so the installation was a breeze. Once I was happy with it - and in compliance with the license - I deleted Win4Lin off the test system and brought it over to main system. I knew it would be a bit more work on this system because I'm running my own kernel. But the kernel patches were as easy as any other kernel patch. Recompile, reboot, install Win4Lin - done.
(Of course someone is going to reply and say Win4Lin didn't work for them, destroyed their machine, set their house on fire, broke up their marriage, caused the death of their only child, inflated Microsoft's market share even more, etc...)
It's not Open Source, but it works. And unfortunately I'm not 15 years old any more so I can't sit around in my parents basement for days at a time screwing with a program just to make it work. My sense of idealism was hit with a hard slap of realism when I turned about 19 or 20. My time away from my computer is quite valuable these days. I'll happily pay a reasonable price for a program that works like it's supposed to. I would prefer to donate money to Open Source projects who give away their software free of charge, but
> "Will Linux ever get past the 'figure it out yourself you l00ser syndrome'."
Yup and what's worse is, it's typically not even the fault of the developer who writes end-user software.
I am one such developer, developing cross-platform apps. Linux is very important to us as we are doing scientific coding. On Windows, I can simply use Inno Setup or something similar and create an easy to use installation package. On Linux, I am yet to find a free alternative as intuitive as Inno Setup or alike. So, in that sense, I am a loser too because I am totally incapable of using the available installation creation tools.
But, here's a question: I hold a Ph.D. from a top USA university and two masters, one on artificial intelligence. I consider myself a good C++ programmer ( I can figure out what Andrei is talking about the first time I read any of his articles or his book ). I taught Java to freshman at a respected college. Have a quite good command of Perl, too. More than 10+ years of coding experience and that's not only scientific coding. I worked on multimedia apps, databases apps, internet apps, etc. Given all this, if I can't figure how a Linux installation system works within 30 minutes, is that really my fault?
I'll change the boot order of my machine when I can code on Linux as easy as I can code on Windows. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon; may be, in 3+ years.
-- ba
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
When you look at commercial software that is made for Windows, for example, most of it is packed with a large number of features that are invariably never used by most users - MS Office, Norton Utilities & Paintshop Pro, for example, are all feature-rich applications but I guarantee that probably only around 5% to 10% of the user base of each one uses the majority of the features that are provided in the software.
The mentality of many UNIX & Linux users is to streamline & optimise their systems as much as possible - therefore, there is perhaps a tendency to veer towards shell-scripting to combine simple tools into powerful programs, rather than using complex packages with features that will never be used.
Add to this that many of us in the UNIX & Linux community (myself included) get very "anal" about optimised code compilation and don't like installing tools that don't give us the source code to play around with.
In summary, it all boils down to the "chicken and egg" situation. Until you get to a stage where you have a large Linux userbase that is reliant on (invariably) GUI-driven commercial applications, no software company will port those applications across - likewise, why port applications to Linux if there is no great demand?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Vendors who are able to sell both Windows and Linux versions of their products (perhaps Mac too) probably don't want to have to train their support staff up for these additional platforms. Hence the lack of promotion.
Take Unreal Tournament 2003 - although the Linux copy was only released just in time for the CD, there was no mention on the box or within it about a Linux version eventually being available.
The situation for Unreal Tournament 2004 is the same, the official website lists its requirements purely as Windows. The box photographs in EU website stores does not show the penguin logo I'm told should be on it in the stores themselves. Amazon, play.com, and others only list Windows as the platform is requires.
And of course, the customer feedback form within the CD case will only ever list Windows versions to tick against.
There's hardly any wonder the vendors claim an extremely low percentage of Linux users, we're never given a chance. And when they point to these figures and announce they will no longer support us even unofficially, they get stung by the community feedback on websites.
It requires more than a company's technical department to support and market Linux versions.
Says he who just purchased Unreal Tournament 2004 on DVD based on a few mentions on community boards that there exists a Linux version on the CD. I await shipment.
There is crapware written for any OS, and since Linux is trying so hard to get mainstream desktop acceptance, Linux crapware is particularly frustrating on many levels.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Seriously, I don't see why any application should have a skin at all. The only skin I should have to select is for my desktop environment. The applications can use that skin. (The exception is if an application uses skins to redefine the layout of the interface--still a very bad idea but some browsers love to do it. The browser should still be able to use my native-skinned widgets. *cough*mozilla*cough*)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
> You guys are way too little rosy eyed -- The main reason IBM likes LInux is that it allows them to sell DB2 and WebSphere licenses to people who don't run IBM hardware.
That logic would see them sell Windows versions of both..
I have worked for IBM for 11 years, so I have a bit of a clue what I am talkign about here.
1 1/2 decades ago, IBM was inyterested in OS and application software as a commodity because it allowed them to sell hardware, server software and services. Now it allows them to sell (as you mention correctly) server software, hardware and services.
Anyway, all I was trying to point out is that this all has nothign to do with being good or evil, but with it fitting in well with their business model, and that not beign anythign new, so as logn as OSS provides the 'good stuff' for them, theres little chance to see them drop out.
There are two problem with this paragraph.
First if you're not the kind of customer who calls tech support then you're probably the kind who will spend days upon days tyring to install it.
Second most customers will probably spend about an hour maybe two and then call tech suppport. How much longer they stay trying to fix the product depends on how good tech support is (either tech support will fix it quickly or they'll give them enough hope to keep trying for days).