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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!
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!
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.
....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.
....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?
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.
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
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!
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
"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.
1) User must have compiler and all related development headers installed. When's the last time a non-development workstation or a home machine gcc and all header files installed for everything? Like, never.
2) Dependency resolution.
3) Version tracking. Pretty simple... I'd like to be sure of what version I have installed.
4) File tracking--knowing what every file on the system belongs to which package.
5) Guranteed removal. I don't care to leave a directory of source compiled code around, and hope that it has make uninstall that works.
6) Easy upgrades. apt-get, apt-get upgrade (apt4rpm or for deb's). I don't really want to keep a watch on freshmeat and see what new is out, download it, compile it, and install it. 2 commands really makes it all seem like a waste of time.
And I'm sure I could go on. :)
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"
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...
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.'
The main point of the article was not that Linux sucks, but that many companies "do not get it". I.e.
- they take any old trash,
- port it to Linux,
- hope that it sells just by virtue of it running on Linux,
- and if it doesn't they go back and wine in their corner about the cheapness of the Linux users (rather than looking at their own mistakes).
- ===> it's almost as if they wanted to have their Linux product fail, so that they can go back to Windows, and tell management "see, Linux is not yet ready for prime-time"
Yes, the article stated several times that often free Linux products are better than some of these commercial "Linux" "products". This is hardly a "Linux suxors" message, on the contrary.