Re: DragonFly BSD marketing

[Danial Thom <danial_thom@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Bob Bagwill <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 17:10:44 -0400, Chris
> Pressey  
> <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I agree strongly with your underlying theme,
> although I'd characterize
> > it slightly differently.  It's not just about
> marketing, which sounds
> > sort of frivolous and underhanded... it's
> actually about governance.
> 
> Governance sort of implies that there are
> agreed-upon principles that a
> cohesive community shares.  I think marketing
> is a better fit for the  
> chaotic
> open source bazaar. ;-)  In a way, DragonFly is
> trying to sell itself,  
> firstly, as
> a neat project to work on, and secondly, as a
> robust-yet-innovative  
> platform
> for computing.  I don't think DragonFly needs
> to market itself in the  
> sense of
> selling DragonFly-logo mousepads and tee-shirts
> (although they'd probably  
> sell :-) ),
> I think it needs to make clear why you would
> want to a) choose to work on  
> it, and b)
> choose to run it, over the alternatives.


There is a theory in marketing that if you "build
a better mousetrap, people will come". But the
real trick is convincing people that your
mousetrap is better. What I'd like to see is some
sort of quantifiable metering of progress. Is
anyone doing performance testing as changes are
made? If so, it would be good to make the results
available. If not, how do you know that your
changes are positive? You can't just do a big
project and then hope when you're done it
performs better than when you started. Since the
entire point of the project is to clean up
FreeBSD to better support threads,
multiprocessing, etc, its seems reasonable to
expect some sort of performance plan, and some
sort of map showing the gains or progress that
have been made.

"Marketing" is the process of convincing people
that you have something that they want, in
whatever form you present it. Outlining a lot of
technical jargon that the average person can't
understand without quantifiable results is only
going to draw super-geeks that blindly agree with
your ideas, which is at best a tiny slice of the
universe. If you want to wait until you have a
shiny, speedy vehicle to display at some super
trade show that's one angle, but you'll have to
do it all with very little support which may take
a very, very long time.

Danial


		
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