Hi all,
OOo branding is what I'm trying to improve, but working on that topic I
stumbled across the MS Office branding page [1] that raises a quite
important question for me:
During the last ten years we've been very successful in being as similar
to MS Office as possible. We copied their features and their menus, used
their icon colors and did everything to make it more easy to change from
a certain MSO version to OOo than to their next version.
With the ribbon topic we started to change this as their implementation
seemed to bring more negative than positive aspects.
Now I looked at the MSO 2010 icons [2] at their branding page and
noticed that there are eleven (!) applications with different names and
distinct program codes interacting with each other to a certain extent.
Our product starts as a single application being able to handle with
many different file formats. Just like a good player for photos and
videos and music it is not only able to open different files of the same
type but different file formats.
What OpenOffice.org has done up to now is to copy the visual approach MS
Office users are used to.
Do we still want this?
What should stand against these eleven icons?
We don't have different applications - as a little trick we just created
links to the main application opening a dedicated file format, called
them Writer or Calc and added an application icon to them.
In the past it was one of our main marketing strategies to be so
compatible with MS Office that people would not even notice that they
worked with OOo.
Now it's different: OOo is well known all over the world. People decide
to use OpenOffice.org - not a costless replacement for MSO they don't
even know by name.
Would it be reasonable in this situation to change our marketing towards
our "all-in-one" application instead of keeping on to copy MS Office
colors and applications?
- OOo has never been so modular that installing parts of it would have
saved a reasonable amount of disk space or memory (with every new
generation of computers this point becomes less relevant).
- Interoperability between Writer, Calc and Impress/Draw has always been
better than between Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We didn't use this topic
in our marketing as prominent as we could.
- In other areas (players, browsers) file formats become less important.
People know about the application to open their files, but don't mind if
the file is a video, an image or a sound file. In contrary, they feel
displeased if the player for their photos doesn't open the videos from
their camera.
- MS Office icons cover a variety of colors from pink over different
violet, blue and green tones to yellow and orange [2]. Even if their
main apps kept the known colors, they are less distinct than previously.
Additionally they are moving away from the four color logo to a single
color logo (orange) [3]. Together with an improved interoperability they
move away from their independent applications towards an overall suite -
do we want to follow as we are already in front of them?
- People know OpenOffice.org, but are not really aware of Writer, Calc,
Draw and Impress. If we want to be compatible with the single MS Office
applications we would need to focus our marketing activities to avoid
people saying "your Word application" or "your Excel".
I think it is more appropriate to tell our users that they don't need to
focus on the file type: It's just OpenOffice.org that can be used for
texts, tables, drawings, presentations and so on.
We moved away from the integrated application approach in the past
towards MS Office's single apps to use their monopoly for us. It was
easy to say "We are quite the same as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but free".
Now I'd like to think about something like:
"We are the right application for all your office documents - our
strengths are ... (standard open file format, integration, open source,
extensions ...). And additionally you don't have to pay any license fees
neither now nor in future. Just download, work and enjoy!"
I wouldn't even mention the names of the MS Office applications, because
this would be free promotion for them...
If we would go this way, it should be based in our new strategic
marketing plan.
What do you think - is this a reasonable way to go?
Best regards
Bernhard
[1]:
http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2009/12/11/office-2010-visuals-and-branding.aspx
[2]:
http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/office2010/WindowsLiveWriter/Office2010VisualsandBranding_BEDE/ProductIcons_2.png
[3]:
http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/office2010/WindowsLiveWriter/Office2010VisualsandBranding_BEDE/OfficeBrand_compare_2.png
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