Hi Leo,
On 13/07/2020 22:07, Leo Moons wrote:
> It strikes me that there's a lot of talk about large organizations, that
> don't contribute to the community. But why not talk to these
> organizations?
Its a good idea, and of course everyone is trying to do that. For
example when C'bra first went into business - we sunk Eur 100k+ into a
full-time sales & marketing person mostly focused on governments for over a
year. They were backed by great enthusiasm and a political push from central
government in the UK, net result: around zero contribution.
In broad brush-strokes: governments are very good at consuming your
time talking, they love that. They even legislate with positive sounding words
about open standards, and so on - but getting actual traction in terms of
reality on the ground - direct contribution or sales that turn into
contribution is extraordinarily hard. I guess that's true of any large
organization the writ from the top runs only so far down the hierarchy.
I had a section on some of the problems here:
https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html#commercial-marketing
Sorry to copy/paste:
"You can sponsor conferences, and attend them. Picking the right
conference is a real trick, and the costs here are prohibitive. Imagine
spending ~€5k attending a conference filled with Open Source interested
Government IT decision makers. Imagine presenting your product, and having the
friendly & enthusiastic conference moderator personally and explicitly promote
buying your products to the entire conference. Imagine the zero leads that
result in paid business, and/or any return at all. Repeat until convinced that
this is a dead end. TDF itself has free booths at many conferences donated by
the organizers, companies do not."
Did I mention that ~no government person has a business card: you can
meet them at a conference and chat to them while they pass by your very
expensive booth, but following that up and turning it into sales is really
tough. They also tend to operate on a timescale that is extraordinarily long -
after all - there is little pressure to do any given thing by any given date.
Naturally TDF could get free booths, free talks etc. left and right,
but by presenting a gratis message in these fora with no firm steer to
contribute this will consume TDF resource too for little win for our mission.
> Go into discussion and convince them of the usefulness of contributing
> to the project. They already get the best office software, but it is
> also important for them that this software is further developed,
> improved and distributed.
So - of course you're right; we need to persuade people one by one, and
make winsome arguments that they should contribute in their self interest. The
problem is how to get that message across efficiently and effectively - the
ecosystem sells software at well below the cost of MS Office. That means that
the cost of marketing and sales to just initiate and complete those
conversations can very easily swamp any possible return.
Currently extraordinarily few enterprises appear to even know they
should have that conversation around the desktop version. Hence attempting some
changes here to make people more aware; does that make sense ? how can we
initiate those conversations with the right people, effectively.
ATB,
Michael.
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