2010/10/18 Hoyt Duff <[email protected]>: > On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Frank Griffin <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The significant costs of trying to be all things to all people, > > This is the biggest danger to any distro.and had, I believe, a > significant part in Mandriva's struggles. It seems to me that the > Mageia devs want to get back to their Mandrake roots.
I do not think so, the quality of the product had nothing to do with Mandriva's problems. In most of Mandriva's problems marketing at least played a leading role. First bad marketing: When Mandrakesoft was a successful startup it had no real marketing which would influence the development. Then the investors came in and brought in the real marketing, people of which never heard about Linux distributions before, so it seemed. They based the wrong management decisions on bad marketing advices, burning mountains of money with fruitless attempts in sidetracks of the Linux world. When that led to the near crash those people were thrown out and Mandrakesoft propagated a "Back to the roots" strategy as a Linux distributor. Which was successful enough to carry them out of chapter 11. Then lack of marketing: But maybe this experience led them to the other extreme: They started to ignore the basic rules of marketing. Be present, be visible, make noise about yourself, make people looking forward to the next news about your brand, and in consequence make your name/brand a known part of the computer world. They ignored all this, shut down PR almost entirely and where they did something in the way of PR it was badly done because marketing (or the store) did something without notifying the other departments (remember the instant-on desaster). Or they sold cheap machines with Mandrakelinux pre-installed without making sure that this pre-installation was done correctly (as happened with the deal with Walmart). Or they propagated deals worldwide where the customer could never benefit from because the hardware was sold in France only. Or they refused to pay a couple of hundred Euros for travelling expenses while they could have had an otherwise cost free roadshow all over Switzerland (courtesy of Jäggi book store chain and wobo). I can easily fill several pages with such examples. The Mandriva story is a perfect example of the two extremes: bad marketing and almost no marketing at all. But all that was not related to the development and/or other technical parts of the company. > BTW, nicely formed argument, Frank. Agreed, 100% ! -- wobo
