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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.)
Well it's the obligatory SCO Linux license of course!
Suggesting flaws in Linux is ungood
/. Collective Hivemind
Linux failures are because of doubleplus ungood MS FUD and the hated Billgates
Violating groupthink is a thoughtcrime
Signed, the
It's so true! All the linux products I know of (and I don't know of many.. hence the marketing problems) are all targeted at the geek community.
This is not a very large market, and we're the pickiest of users, mostly because each of us thinks we can do it better.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Just today I ordered some herbal viagra and a salve that will increase my memory, products I would have never known about were it not for helpful emails sent by well-meaning strangers. Perhaps people like me could be told about open source operating systems by similar methods. Perhaps the .iso installation files could be sent as attachments.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
If everyone stopped selling Windows products, and sold Linux products instead, Linux Product Sales would increase.
"because most products they're asked to buy are either poorly marketed or don't work well"
Christ, that's usually why ANY product fails.
Is a lame product like Walmart's Linux PC it?
Or is TiVo it?
Linux products are all over the place, usually concealing the fact that they are based on Linux. Just because Linux and its standard UI are not popular in consumer devices doesn't mean that Linux itself is not used and the products based on it aren't successful.
I have been pwned because my
....his experiences are common to *most* products sold, regardless of underlying OS. The thing that is specific to Linux/geek is that we see no docs and poor installation setups as a fun challenge and brag about it when we conquer it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
....because no apps have ever sold well for linux, as it holds a tiny share of the desktop, there is no incentive to make the apps of the highest quality.
One thing that may change this...I wonder how different OS-X applications are from gnome/KDE apps. Certainly if the vendor uses Qt there is not much difference, but what about using the native toolkits?
The reason I ask is...so many multimedia apps are being ported to OS-X, and Mac users (especially multimedia types) demand stability and dependability.
As more windows apps are ported to OS-X, many by vendors who swore they would never port to unix or linux, is there any chance of these high end apps migrating the extra step to Linux?
Yeah, I'm definitely with the author in saying that companies think they are doing you a favor by porting their software to Linux. I think that people could easily fall into this in the past, but not so today. I guess the free programs are just too good. The payware programs have to not only meet the challenge, but will have to receive rave reviews (like here on slashdot) before people will buy it. I guess that's how I am. Maybe that's why Codeweavers is successful.
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 thing I learnt from working (as opposed to freelancing) is that you need to take into account business value of a product, otherwise it is next to useless.
Most self-inspired products are too heavily biased towards technology, but not enough in the business sense.
I'm curently researching this spam filter, it may sound like a good idea, maybe it even works, but I have yet to see a business sense in it, i.e. how to market it, brand it and add value to the users. Please note that by business sense, it doesn't necessarily mean profit, but a sense for users to actually use it.
I guess what I am trying to say is, most geek-based products are developed based on the developers' vision of the world, but they hardly have a chance to meet up with potential project sponsors, and consumers (focus groups) who are really the persons to tell what should be developed.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I use Linux and don't believe everything should be free, I believe the best way to make money off of Linux is to blend both closed source and open source products kind of like Apple does with OS X(the GUI is proprietary but the core of the OS is open sourced). If someone made a really killer X implementation and a good GUI even if it was closed sourced I think it would sell. Linux operating systems are not real moneymakers, the applications that run on top of it and the Linux support services is where the real money can be made.
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."
Perhaps the best linux distro that i've used is a commercial one. While they also have a free version, buying it saves bandwith, and the frustration of navagating their reliativly crapy ftp
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.
Hell, you can't even get a lot of linux users to buy a commercial distro, much less any software that runs on it. This isn't flamebait, this is the sad, cold truth. Note I didn't say all, but wayyyyy too many.
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
At work I'm doing an embedded linux system. I've got a nice little board which has an XScale processor and some other goodies. It's my job to program it to do various things. The embedded linux system that came pre-installed is taking up too much room. I need a cross-compiler so I can build a new kernel and new system for it.
So I take the dev kit cd that came with it and try to install it by following the directions included. No go. It wants an LSB distro and I use gentoo. I hack the perl install scripts, still no dice. Apparently the install disc has rpms debs and tars. And it installs by converting them all to one of the 3. So if you use debian the install scripts converts the tgz and the rpm to deb then isntalls them. Too bad the conversion program doesn't work. Their tech support didn't help much either.
What did I do? I went online and searched for arm linux. Got arm-linux-gcc from an ftp and patched up the 2.4.25 kernel. When its easier for me to do things myself for free than to use your product what am I paying for besides the hardware? Technically I paid for that support and that software and I got jack. Just too many free and non-free linux things do not work. Sure, there is plenty of commercial software that doesn't work. The odd game here and there and such. But if the company behind it isn't fake you can bet that it is going to work sooner or later. With linux stuff sometimes you just don't know.
This is the opinion of a gentoo user, so I'm not bashing linux as a whole. I'm just saying that if you're going to make something, make it work. Just because a geek is going to use it doesn't mean they want to have to go through more effort to make it go. They just want to go through a little effort to make it go better.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I don't know. After all these years there are too many distributions of linux wearing the OS too thin.
The penguin has been a good symbol, but how the hell are you supposed to use one symbol to market for 40 distributions? You can't. The only thing that came close IMHO was the redhat symbol. Suse and debian are great distros, but it's marketed like a good singer than a superstar. Christ, SCO has done more marketing for linux in general than any distro.
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.
t's hard to say: Are the free programmers gifted coders, or are the commercial coders just REALLY bad ..?
First, lets ignore the fact that there is not a clear disctinction between free and commercial programmers. Much of the free work is done as charity by commercial developers donating their time or organizations donating their commercial developers.
Free programmers gifted? No more, no less than any others. What they are is free. Not "free" as in speech, not "free" as in beer, but "free" as in not answerable to anyone else. No boss screaming about deadlines, no my company is screwed if we don't ship by this date, etc. They are free to take whatever time they need, their customers have no financial control over them. Ironically this control often leads to rushed jobs and lower quality.
I'll emphasize
A N D
the dopey stuff of Basics:
Installation Testing
Feature Testing
Usage Testing
If you can't install it striaght off, and start working (either straight away or doing the tutorials... and YOU DO HAVE TUTORIALS... DON'T YOU?) right then and there, you've just blown thousands of man hours as thousands of users bblow their time trying to puzzle out your spaghetti code - and it doesn't matter if it's running in Linux, Windoze, or OSx or whatever. Either it works straight up or it doesn't.
The problem is, WAY too many shops see QA as a an after thought if it is thought of at all, and given the geek-centered history of Linux, it is (sadly) far too common in Linus ware.
One of the main differences between really stunning software and crapware is that the stunning software has a crack QA team running a tight shop with the engineers, and the engineers accept and respect the opinions and findings of QA, just as QA knows the exigencies and limitations of the coders. The crapware has zero QA or the QA consists of the programmers doing basic unit testing, which is too often close too useless due to external dependencies and doesn't address anytihng about UI design...
I did blackbox QA for a very long time, (and still occassionaly do with a good offer) and I have Zero Patience for software that isn't properly tested. Unfortunately, it seems that blackbox is striaght up ignored or sent to India for "chimp testing" (blackbox done to testcases and matrices only) or automated versions thereof, is never brought into the specification process, and in the meantime, it's all gone to whitebox or greybox - which rarely addresses more obvious and critical issues that question basic assumptions in a program, as the lead programmers are too often thin skinned, under served in the social skills dept, and overly identified with the project.
And it has nothing to do with Linux: but the workers in Linux too often have a variable sense of what is an appropriate amount of effort a user should put forth in using a given application or system.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The retail marketing of Linux and Linux applications sucks. Of course, all the naysayers are going to declare the retail marketplace dead, but for the general public it's still an important venue.
Walk into any store that carries Linux products. You see some out of date distros. Then you see some new RedDrakE boxes. But what's the difference between the purple Enterprise, magenta Professional and red Desktop editions? There's also FreeOffice in two different packagings, one seemingly generic for a variety of operating systems, and one specifically for RedDrakE which is more expensive. Then you see a copy of FubarOffice 2004, packaged in a tiny DVD box. What the fsck is that? Obviously it's not big enough to have included a manual. Along side it you see FubarPaint and FubarPro. To add to the confusion, there will be the obligatory "UltraLinux Toolkit" containing nine CDs of nine obsolete distros.
And not to pick on Linux, but if you look closely enough, there will be a FreeBSD and NetBSD, each with two different packagings from two different distributors, but containing the same software version.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Forget marketing, it is the install/config process that makes Linux products hard to sell. Let's face it, Linux assumes that a reasonably skilled sysadmin is sitting at the controls. Windows assumes that the sysadmin can be relied upon to click "Yes", "Next", "OK", and "Finish".
Package installers go only so far. Progress has been made regarding dependencies and cascading installations, but I see room for improvement. I find many products still require the "./configure ; make ; make install" method.
The people who write the code are hard-pressed to consider every possible Linux distro or hardware/software environment. Poor documentation doesn't help. We get away with it on the server side, but this will not work with embedded systems or desktops, where you don't have a sysadmin ready to hack the install. If I am buying a product, I expect the install to be smooth and trouble-free. If I have to sit and hack, I might as well stick with free stuff or write it myself.
Don't get me wrong, Linux products are great, once they are installed. Proprietary products are easy to install, but it's all downhill from there.
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
Will Linux ever get past the 'figure it out yourself you l00ser syndrome'. I use Windows products precisely because I don't have to 'read the fucking manual'. (RTFM) Micro$oft based products generally work intuitively, most Linux products don't. It was only because Red Hat 5.1 installed in an understandable manner that I took up Linux at all after buying serveral distros over a period of a few years. Now I make a living on the Red Hat Linux platform, but I still use Photoshop and Illustrator on my other PC's. Not much has changed in 7 years.
"LIVE GNU OR DIE."
Ok, die then. You obviously have no intention of living GNU. GNU is about free like speech should be, not free like people wish beer was. Yes, there are free beer versions of most open source software. However, these mostly come from pay software: Linux (Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, et. al. are all pay software primarily); ReiserFS (Hans collects enough from support and alternate licensing to live reasonably); MySQL; etc.
Promoting a refusal to pay for software has nothing to do with GNU or open source. Read http://www.tlug.jp/docs/rms.html to see Stallman take to task someone talking like you. The issue is not to get software without paying for it. The issue is to be free to modify the software afterwards. You can get binaries without paying for them, both legally (freeware) and illegally (warez). However, they will never be free software in the GNU sense of the word, as they are unmodifiable.
Living GNU means refusing to use software that you can't modify and redistribute. Refusing to pay for it? You are just leeching off the system. Money is the contribution of those who can't code. Money is also the way that those who can't code can influence development. Thus, paying for software makes it more inclusive by including non-coders in the process.
For example, it seems like 8 out of 10 programs on sourceforge have 'no documentation' and rely the user bringing what to the lay public would seem like "expert knowledge" to grok not only installation, but even how the features work.
Commercial products seem just as poorly documented. Having had to deal with end users for our relatively simple business, I've come to the conclusion the you have to treat every program and option that they interface with as if it where a "Name_of_Program for Dummies" book. We have to build on-line tutorials just for using FTP clients because the documentation that comes with them is so horrible as to be useless. --
Filmo The Klown
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/
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.
Perhaps there are many outfits out there run by geeks with big egos? They believe that they are center of the world and think that anyone who can't install/use their functionally perfect software don't deserve to use computers in the first place.
The cold hard fact is that many average comsumers have problems installing even simple Windows programs and they are the majority, not us geeks.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
No, but your employer may be able to deduct your salary when they are donating you. Regarding you donating your personal time the IRS would probably declare your time to be a hobby. :-) Disclaimer: IANACPA.
But seriously, I donated time to the local county search and rescue team. Only physical equipment was deductible. Maybe you could get a deduction for the computer if and only if it was used only for free software. Again, IANACPA. Something interesting to look into.
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
In the U.S., I don't believe you can deduct time or services as a charitable donation. It must be objects or cash. This is what I've heard, at least regarding graphic-art/advertising, that pro-bono work is undeductable, except out-of-pocket expenses. I imagine it's true in all other industries as well.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
We can chose if we want to buy a power pack, professional, server, etc of (Your Favorite Distro here) or we can just spend time downloading it and hunting arround the net for the ad ons we want
I've used a number of Distros Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, for Redhat and Mandrake sometimes I've bought the boxed sets and other times I installed the downloadable editions (purchased for $5-15AUD from a local CD seller (I dont have broadband 8( )) and I must say I haven't really gained anything out the boxed sets and I don't read the Manuals (Maybe it is because sometimes they are not very readable).
In the past, before I saw the light I used to buy lots of M$ software, but still thought it was porly written, but I didn't think I had any choice. In my work place we buy a lot of poor software, but there are no open source competitors to those packages, so we buy it because we have no choice (except write our own)
So with open source software unless you really think you are getting something more out of the "pay for" than the "free"(as in beer) why are you going to buy. I remember that my powerpack of Mandrake 8.2, was more buggy that my download edition of 8.1! That put me off box sets forever, but the download editions of Mandrake got progressively worse with 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 (haven't tried 10.0 yet).
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
I hate mowing my yard so you should mow for me for free. I WILL NOT PAY FOR YARD MOWING. Yard mowing should be available for free for all people. And I'm driving a 10 year old car. It's not fair that there are people with newer and nicer cars out there. Mod me down, but I WILL NOT PAY FOR A NEW CAR, and you shouldn't either. New cars should be available for free for all people.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
So, on the one hand, you have OSS stuff that works *great* but takes *forever* to make and isn't exactly what people (think they) want at any given moment.
On the other hand, you have salespeople feeding people crapware produced over the course of a few months to satisfy the latest buzzword-driven market-craze.
And, suprise suprise, the buzzword-laden focus-group-created crapware wins in the marketplace? This doesn't sound like anything new to capitalism, or anything unique to the computer industry for that matter. It sounds like a *much* larger problem.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
The major "selling" is of the technology to Upper Management rather than from vendors.
The first time this became critical was when the Intel 8086 came out, and Intel started selling based on management commitment to Intel, not on technical grounds. A competing processor - the Z8000 - won just about every technical analysis, but Intel sold to management and that's what made them kings. It's a critical concept. Engineers think the best solution wins, but the best business decision isn't always the best technical solution.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
"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.
Maybe I'm not a real linux geek, but...
I *hate* when something is difficult for no good reason. A 'monumental effort to get where others have gone before, and anyone with enough time can get' is a monumental waste of time.
RANTThis isn't like the NYT crossword puzzle. The point of the install is not to just have done it. What's so fun and challenging about wasting orders of magnitude more geekhours installing than the documentation/packaging would have taken?
It often seems that developers are masochists. It is not reasonable making people play Where's Waldo with the source just install stuff.
While it's not cool to complain that your free widget wasn't a good enough free widget[ unless you're gunna do something about it]- That only works for those already invested in it.
On the other hand:
1. There are negative consequences to crap doc/packaging. Make it clear that it's less probable to get this thing running than your '64 Fiat "thats been sitting a while." 2. If nothing exists that installs reasonably easily, on most new base-distro installs, then 'Linux' doesn't really "have it" yet. If most people that want "those features" can't get them, you're gunna turn off more potential friends that simply didn't have the time 'you' wasted, than fans who will pick up the reigns. 3. Developers should put a little more effort into doc, maybe cut that 2 day install down to 4hrs. It's far more likely that fans would contribute to building the doc that brings it down to 45 minutes./RANT
Finally, a heartfelt THANK YOU for all the great and not so great FREE software. And, oh yeah, I still brag about it...
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
No, it's because so many developers (and this applies to small/amateur developers on the whole) focus on skins, supporting skins, creating ghastly skins, skin ranking systems, user-submitted skins (often even more ghastly), and anything related to skins, all of which are entirely irrelevant for almost all software.
Case in point: SpyBot -- brilliant piece of software that I downloaded recently. However, why should there even be "new cool Skins" for a little application that removes spyware from your computer?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I think the main flaw in most OSS projects is that they don't have a financially motivated boss directing the development resources. Therefore, the developers persue the path that produces the best technology, but not always in a user-friendly or marketplace-friendly way like all commerical software has to be in order to sell copies.
Just consider Bill Gates as the PHB-in-chief. An OSS project needs to focus on what the users want to see, rather than what the programmers want to develop, in order to gain widespread distribution. A totally buggy and insecure program can still be sold to a user if it does the things the user wants it to do. Sure, the user should know better, but they don't, and that's why PHBs can be so stupid but connect with the marketplace so well...
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
How is Cocoa and .NET "Storming the market" when both are essentially tied to specific architectures and is the case of Cocoa, tied to aspecific hardware vendor?
Cocoa is a great tool for building applications for OS X but unless your a software development house targeting a niche market, OS X is out of of the question.
I guess thats why Java has been "Storming the market" for quite some time.
Linux is cool and all, but seriously- developers, if their intent is to sell something, need to accept the fact that in many cases, the wheel has already been invented - to circumvent this either due to sloppiness, or even arrogance, is a surefire way to raise the ire of prospective consumers.
Let me use a couple of examples. First, there's Evolution, purported to be an Outlook killer. Generally, I like it, but there's one thing that just torques my chain every time I use it: email retrieval. For whatever contorted reason, the developers have decided that if you have eight different email accounts that you manage, you, but default, want to retrieve mail from all of them at the same time (every time), or none of them. Mozilla had it right.
Then, there's Konqueror. A nice browser - very robust. But what the HELL where they thinking when they decided that the bookmarks menu should operate like the Start menu in Windows, where instead of scrolling, it expands horizontally? I guess I can see how they might think it saves time, but it really hijacks the usefulness of the menus in general.
Both of these have been frustrating enough for me to consider alternatives. I'm not shunning the notion of innovation - but I would encourage developers to CAREFULLY consider any alteration to what have become accepted and standard methods.
He didn't say he will not pay for learning how to program, he won't pay for the software product no matter what. Beside, free information for building a car is not the same as a free new car, nor does information on programming same as a software product. If someone wants to charge for their software, so be it (even GPL allows for charing for software). If they want to give it away for free, more power to them.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Personally, I would add one more app - Visio. It isn't in the ballpark of the 3 apps that you have listed as far as units sold/installed, but the community of users that do have it on their desktop represent (imo) a key demographic.
Of course, I'm in that demographic, so perhaps I am biased (-: And if I thought for a single nanosecond that microsoft would port Viso to linux, I would have to also be delusional.
But should someone create a quality replacement for visio, I would migrate my company laptop to a free unix of some sort and never look back...
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
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.
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.
*Amen*. I have never been able to figure out why, the more companies deal with large clients, the more they feel that an obscure description is necessary. I've started to form a theory, however. I've noticed that vendors that work with large clients *always* want to get the large clients on the phone, talking to a salesman, so that they can figure out how to maximize the amount of money they're sticking them for. My suspicion is that vendors feel that if their website's product description is unclear enough (if it has "solution" or "enterprise class" in it, I'd be uncomfortable already) potential clients will call their sales department. I have been in the position of doing purchasing recommendations for two companies I've been at. Perhaps I'm just younger or like using the Internet more than the other people there, but I don't take the approach of "get a salesman's phone number and sit through his schtick" that a lot of other people do. If I can't figure out what a product is or what someone's pricing scheme is in ten minutes from their website, it goes right to the bottom of my list. I'll call someone as a last resort. It's just not worth hassling with the huge quantities of bullshit that salesmen throw at you, having to worry about jotting down anything important they say instead of having a nice textual record to look at, etc.
It's really funny to look at product descriptions on Freshmeat -- the descriptions for commercial products are almost universally worse than open-source projects, probably because commercial types are worried about accidentally limiting their product's capabilities too much. Compare two Freshmeat-listed backup systems -- the commercial Arkeia and the gratis/libre Unison. While each system is related to backups, after reading the Arkeia description, I have a large quantity of bullshit couched in nice adjectives in my head. Despite the fact that Arkeia does a much simpler set of things than Unison does, I have less of an idea of what its capabilities are than of Unison's, partly because Unison's developer didn't waste time with flag-waving.
May we never see th
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
Its commercial software like this that makes me try to stick to free, mainstream alternatives.
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.
almost trumps location in this instance.
most of us aren't interesed in learning how to compile 'packages' with missing parts. the 'joke' in the 'community' is: 'they'll have to learn something, sometime'. chuckling into obscurity in this case.
there have been improvements, a ways to go yet. see you there?
Yes, wonderful system called Peer Review(TM)
Free of Charge, guaranteed to work.
What more do you want?
The idea that a vendor will do a crude port of a product to Linux, then abandon the market because it doesn't sell also applies to Mac software. There have been pretty good ports of Windows software to Macintosh that bombed because the Windows products that were ported were junk to begin with -- it just didn't make any difference in the Windows market because people bought them anyway.
Oh, yes. There are lots or products for Windows, but how many of them are better than very poor? Perhaps ten percent?
That would so not work. Just look at Vietnam. 95% of all computers run pirated Windows (most of the rest, the bought software, runs on gov't computers). But MS said they will lower prices in Vietnam to compete with Linux! 95% piracy and total revenue of only a few millions...
Damn, you're probably right.
Still, I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I imagine all Windows users -- American, European, everyone -- stealing Windows.
-kgj
-kgj
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).
The fundamental business case.
Ok, so you just bought a $50k server to run a $50k installation of, say, Oracle. You have 2500 employees and the lifespan of the beast is five years. That's $1,600 per month (not including interest). You could save $800 per month by using MySQL or PostgreSQL, which is about thirty two cents per month, per employee. Your SysAdmin/DBA, on the other hand, will cost $6-8k per month or about $2.80 per user, regardless. Say you have an application suite developed for six months (hah, six months, right) with a team of four people at the cost of your SysAdmin. That's $168,000, or $2,800 per month, or just over a buck per user per month. If that development was to equal, say, the Oracle Collaboration Suite, which would cost about $37,000 per year, that's $187,500 over the five-year term in question, or about $1.25 per user per month. Now, let's say you could get that that using OSS that would take four people a week to integrate (YEAH, RIGHT), or about $7k. You'd only save about $1/employee/month.
Now, do you as a business manager, or "solution provider" who has to deal with business managers, still care much about "free software?" The little bit of security that comes with a software maintenance agreement with a trusted vendor (deservingly or not) is often worth that extra buck as the old FUD goes: "no one was ever fired for buying IBM."
> On the other hand, you don't get support from Microsoft when using WordPerfect on their system either. It's difficult to support every single piece of software there is for Linux.
True, but last time I checked I couldn't download Wordperfect off of Microsoft's web site. Even if they put packages in an "unsupported" section it would be better than what they do now, which is tell you that it's outside the scope only after you download and (try to) install it. It's not that I expect them to support everything, but a warning about what they will and won't support is very difficult to find.
Virg