[ short intro (aka "who the heck is this guy?"): my name is santiago roza, i'm 25 and i live in argentina, i have a business-oriented academic background (business administration) with a tech-oriented professional background (i work as a tech consultant, and write a column for a tech magazine here in argentina), and of course i'm a strong supporter of free software ]
i'm writing this email because i'm not sure i like the direction we're following, and i'd like to explain why. like many others (i assume), i joined this list after reading john williams' "marketing gnome", an article i still find truly inspiring: http://gnomejournal.org/article/26/marketing-gnome let me quote what i found to be the key paragraph: "marketing is not about convincing people to buy (or use) your product or service. That is selling. Marketing is about matching the output of your organization to the demands of the (chosen) market. Put another way, marketing is about finding out what people want, and then giving it to them [and then communicating that, i would add]." in the 5-6 months i've been here, i haven't seen much of "finding out what people want", and even less of "giving it to them", but 99% of "communicating that" (unluckily we don't even know what is "that", and who are "them"). in other words, i haven't seen much marketing in gnome-marketing: - about "finding out what people want", not only i haven't seen one action oriented to that, but when i compiled (on luis villa's request) a list of issues in gnome 12's negative reviews, no one seemed to care or even had an opinion. - about "giving it to them", i haven't seen much contact between this list and the gnome developers, something i consider a critical issue, but again no one seems to care about. and i'm not even sure that issues list was passed on to the developers (and if it was, i didn't read anything about it). and this week we're thinking of catchy slogans (for the nth time)... ok that's necessary, but imho first we should try to find out what people think of gnome, what people want from gnome, what people like about gnome, what they dislike, what do we have (either real or imaginary) that other desktops don't... and btw who the heck are "the people" (do we want to target developers or decision makers or kde end users or win end users or who??). in other words, i'd like to see more marketing, and less selling/advertising... at least until we know what we have, what customers need, and what we could do to offer that to them (not to mention finding out who "they" are). well, that's pretty much it. i'd like to know if i'm the only one here concerned about these issues, and even if i am, what's your opinion about my rant :) greetings! -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list