It is hardly surprising that long-term users of the distro are interested in its future. Nor is it surprising that there is such concern, given the tone of the ongoing invitations to participate in their Increase of Capital. At the very least, they could do with some PR adviser to suggest better ways of phrasing these emails.
I am afraid, creative as some of the suggestions to improve their finances are, most of them are just tinkering at the edges. Have a look at http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/future.php3 for a summary of their current financial position. They need 20,000 users to become MandrakeClub members to get over the current cash squeeze. If you introduce cheaper, lower-privileged membership, you are going to need incrementally more members at this level. Are there really 100,000s of users just waiting for cheaper membership of MandrakeClub in order to contribute? Is cost really the main obstacle? Millions of people and businesses spend hundreds or thousands of pounds each year on Windows software. Why are Mandrake users so different? Can most people really not afford $120 p.a. for Silver Club membership (even discounting the benefits one receives for membership)? Or is it that they simply choose not to, because they can get it for free, as long as they take no personal responsibility for the future of the distro?
The salesman's solution is always to chase market share by lowering prices. He is not worried about profits - only sales. But any sensible businessman will take the opposite view - that profits matter, not market share. It is my belief that Mandrake need to do the opposite of introducing lower-priced options - i.e. increase prices. Perhaps not significantly for box-sets - they need to remain competitive with RedHat and SuSE. And I am not convinced that charging for ISOs would be a good idea - people will simply download RedHat instead and Mandrake will lose a significant part of their user community.
No, where they need to raise their prices significantly is in support. How on earth can a support incident only cost $10? That doesn't even pay for an employee to read the incident report. I would have thought there should be a less static charging structure for support, so that "Lart" questions that can be answered quickly can be charged moderately ($20?), while problems that take longer to solve are charged more heavily in proportion to the time required, with a backstop position that problems demonstrated to be bugs are not charged. I suspect this would have a beneficial effect both on revenues and on quality, as it would provide the incentive (that is currently missing) to ensure that releases had as few bugs as possible.
Beyond that, Mandrake need to attack the business market far more. There is a simple reason why RedHat and SuSE are so focussed on this market, and that is revenue. Users will think twice about paying for support, businesses will be much more likely to pay for quick solutions and peace of mind. Hopefully, that is the idea behind their thick-client terminal server project. Combine that with something like Win4Lin Terminal Server to provide centralised management and reduced hardware requirements and running costs, while continuing to support legacy Windows systems for those that need. As long as they can charge a decent price to provide credible support for such systems, this could be Mandrake's "killer app". I just hope they figure out a way to bring in enough cash in the short term to allow them to progress such a business model.
Cheers,
Bruno Prior
SI Reasoning wrote:
On Fri, 2002-12-27 at 06:03, Jason Straight wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1On Friday 27 December 2002 01:43 am, SI Reasoning wrote:That's funny - I decided against buying Mandrake CD's when I saw that what was offered on the shelf at Wal-Mart was a release candidate snapshot from cooker. Why pay $50 for what was older than what I could download? I'd rather just give the $ straight to mdk to have access to the iso's.This would be a mistake. The best thing about having the iso out before the boxed set is that you have all of these people testing and reporting problems back to get fixed. By the time the boxed set is available, many bugs have been squished and the paying user gets a very fine distro. It is really as if the final is really a final release candidate and one gets a whole lot more eyes to help clean everything up before the boxed set is available. I think that is a huge benefit.
I really don't think the box set gains anything by having the iso's out early.
The boxed sets aren't necessarily for techies such as ourselves. They are gobbled up by end users who do want a smooth package when they install. Having a month or so to iron our the remaining issues helps tremendously in having a much more stable product to the end user. Mandrake's ability to search and install updates during the install procedure helps to make this possible.I don't agree with neutreware. If you offer a free software that is inferior in any way to the original then how are you advertising for the product? What you are doing is tainting the market by providing a falsely negative image of your product.I believe Mandrake's best shot is capturing market share by getting as many people to use their software as possible. Here is a simple plan: Create a demo cd ala Knoppix and try and bundle with everything you can (new computer, etc).
I don't think this is neutraware. For techies the isos are still available, but for newbies, a slimmed down version that just works when booted would encourage exploration without risk. The reason it is slimmed down is that it will need to run off a single cd. I though it would be cool to allow for an install from the demo cd but that may not even be necessary, it would be fine for a dsl/cable user doing a network install but modem users would most likely want to buy a boxed set and the demo is really something that would cater to the end user. There is an initial fear of trying something new but people don't seem to fear risk free demo's, especially if something "free" that they want (such as free online minutes" are available. I believe that this is the best way to get Mandrake in end user's hands and these are the people most likely to pay money for the services. I don't think it would be good practice to try and extract too much from the tech community that puts in quite a few hours trying to make Mandrake better and act as an unpaid support service in many cases. These are the people that make distros like Mandrake so strong that they can compete with the much better funded organizations such as Redhat (and Microsoft).- -- Jason Straight
