Hi Dave, On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:54:36 +0200 Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip] > > Firefox, by the way, was not a product of marketing. It was the > product of the will of two people, made possible by the fact that > it's free software. There was no market analysis, someone said "going > on the internet has to be easier than this", and then made the web > browser *they* wanted to use. > Indeed, there was no market analysis. Usually, there is not -- this is entrepreneurship in the sense of Schumpeter (1883 – 1950): as an exploration of the market possibilities. However, their idea wasn't brand new: People were complaining loudly about the bloated Mozilla Suite back then. For example, there was a small browser-only product before Firefox called K-Meleon, running on Windows. Why was Firefox such a success althought it came later as K-Meleon IIRC? Both were open source, both had a price of zero, both were smaller and faster then the Mozilla suite, and both were easy to install. What was the difference? I can't produce numbers or figures but I believe the hype generated by spreadfirefox was a major factor. > > Isn't that just another way of discounting them as irrelevant? > No, it's not. It just means to put things in perspective. Making it sound otherwise was not my intention. The large majority of people are not going to read the blogs of the engineers for a few month when they want to buy a car; they are studying reviews from independent journalists. And the majority of people is not even wasting their time with studying in-depth technical reviews when they spend 40 Euros on the next technical gagdet, be it a DVD player or a microwave. On the other hand, these people are not willing to read a manuel when they simply want to install additional software on their desktop. Remebering things like this puts statements like the ones of Doc Searls into the right perspective. Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list