Re: [libreoffice-website] Work on the "Why?" pages

Narayan Aras wrote:

> That applies to EACH and EVERY volunteer. So we should not bring this in every time we discuss 
> something.

You have raised the concern about deadlines, not me. Deadlines in a 
volunteer based project have a different meaning that in a real job, and 
this should be clear for everyone. Complaining about missed deadlines 
does not help. We all know that we miss deadlines, but we have learned 
to cope with the problem. In the long range, a single missed deadline 
counts nothing.

> We are not talking of the "pace of the project", but meeting deadlines set by SC itself.
> I did not set the release date.
> We had to finish the website before that launch date AND it had to have those "why" pages.
> The marketing inputs should have come before that. They did not.
> Where does that leave us?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding about the "why" pages. They 
might be important, but they are not key, so the web site could live 
without them.

The experience tells us that in the geographies where OOo has been more 
successful the web site has contributed in a negligible way to the 
awareness.

I can tell you that the Italian web site sucks, and has not been updated 
for the last 5 years, but OOo in Italy is well over 20% market share and 
still growing.

The web is an excellent marketing tool, but is a single component of a 
comprehensive strategy, and - for sure - not the most important.

Yes, the strategy should be written somewhere, but until we are caught 
in endless discussions I will never find the time to write it down and 
it will remain in my mind and in the minds of people I have talked with, 
like the ones that will be in Brussels tomorrow and on Sunday (I will 
present some ideas about the marketing strategy).

I will share the presentation, which I have still to start writing.

> Your email answer mentions that you will be writing to me later on that issue.
> I only expect that you would do what you stated.

No, I will not answer that email because the logo and tagline problems 
are low in priority now, and we still have to elaborate about them in 
relation to the development of the project.

The logo will evolve, but is not a key issue. In a free software project 
the brand is not the logo but all the intangibles around. The document 
icons, for instance, are probably more important that the logo.

If there is a domain where marketing theory does not work is free 
software. Sun has applied the marketing theory to OOo to get to zero 
results in the US. Communities have used common sense and some theory to 
achieve far better results.

Sorry, but I am feed up with ranting, and from now on when I will not 
answer a message it will mean that I find the topic as too oriented to a 
rant than to a solution.

--
Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
Mobile +39.348.5653829 - VoIP: +39.02.320621813
Skype: italovignoli - GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

--
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to website+help@libreoffice.org
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/website/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***