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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.)
Really a great, great product, and it's a group of people that are dedicated to making Linux work as desktop product for everyone.
I have office on my desktop Linux boxes, not to use full time (as I truely like OpenOffice an ALL platforms) but as a way to get around the office drones who have brain collapses when getting RTF or even PDF files. Also, I happen to like Dreamweaver as a platform to do quick web development. Mix that with the fact you can have Photoshop working without a VM and being able to use great stuff like Quanta to do code development... it really is the best of both worlds.
Also it's a good example of why pay software (when priced reasonably) really does have it's place on the Linux platform.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
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'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