On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 13:52 -0400, Mike Feravolo wrote: > Good Day People: > > I don't know what "Advocate" means and I wouldn't even know how to spell > it if there weren't spell checkers. > > I guess that's because I majored in Computer Science in college and not > English. So I use small words to express my thoughts like "sell", since > that is what you have to do to get regular people to do something new.
[I'm not going to put a warning about long e-mails, because people don't have to read this] Hmm, whilst you may be right, I'd still like to dispute this notion of "regular people". I don't think we can make such a crass generalisation, nor are we justified to; although this 'rant' isn't really about marketing as such. I think we should be producing software that works well for us, and (considering we are all the same species.. mostly) it should be that this software also works well for other people. If it doesn't, I call that a bug, with merit just as any other bug. I don't specify a requirement on the person doing the developing, and each developer can have her own target audience: one general target audience of "regular people" is just too wide to be defined well enough to see what we are targeting! I, perhaps somewhat naively, fail to believe that people are so shallow that they can all be generalised over, or that they all fall for the same eye candy. Every person is different, but with a flexible system we can address any need. As a result, we cannot market to one audience. We must market specifically to audiences, cultures, separately. We cannot address the enterprise sector the same way we can talk to casual home users; or the enterprise sectors in China and France; or home users in India and the USA. By "regular people", I assume you mean "casual home users". And as you did not specify a smaller set, I will also assume "North American casual home users", however much I'd like not to; for not every "regular" person in all the "regular people" is the same, nor is every "regular person" North American. However, this is not necessarily the sector with the most money in; even if it may be the most interesting - for you - to target. So is it the correct sector to target by "regular people"? Who knows! I certainly don't. However, we do all try and speak the same language. It would definitely be confusing if we didn't. So making assumptions is often a necessary part of life; not all things in life are scientifically precise (rather like standardising units of measurement for storage devices etc). Nonetheless, we are not here to make casual discussion on marketing to "regular people". We want to be successful in our mission of Free Software ubiquity, as it pushes fairer ethics into the rest of life (not just software development), and for whatever other reasons, be they ideological or financial in origin. Hence, we must choose target audiences and discuss what the best method of marketing our product (in this case, Ubuntu; but it really doesn't matter - I can see this applying to any product). That's all folks, Toby Smithe -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
