Subject: Re: Ideas for "Marketing" Abiword
From: Mike Johnson (dev_randjohnson@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Aug 04 2001 - 15:08:09 CDT
Route 4 and 5 sound the best to me, with a few grips and notes about 4.
AOL, as in your example, isn't going to be interested in just angering
MS for no good reason. From the past, the power plays the two have made
are carefully choosen battlefields over issues that have direct,
meaningful importance to their marketshare.
It would be a tough sell to any company. However, to convince a company
that they *need* something like AW because it directly makes their
product better and helps increase their marketshare, would be a distinct
advantage point in the business mind.
That leads to the question: what does AW have to sell?
The first thing that springs to mind is the capability to embed AW
because it's Free Software roots. AOL sells several products, but the
marketing idea for them is that their software is the "complete Internet
experience". But of all the ways AOL can facilitate the delivery of a
document to a user's computer, AOL cannot open that document. Nor are
they very likely to try on their own, for risk of angering MS and
needlessly infringing on a market area they have very little interest in
-- office documents.
AW's only shot here (in my mind) is embedding. That way, a user
recieving a document doesn't have to leave the "AOL experience", the
document opens right there -- in the AOL client. It's possible to do
this with Word, of course, but using AW would mean one less dependancy
on MS.
All that is pretty much similar to the point being made, but with more
emphasis on the program itself, rather than the file format. File
formats are only really useful to people trying to control information,
and .abw is the antithesis of that. It was quite clearly created with a
careful mind toward protecting the information and simply storing data,
rather than restricting it's to a single program for marketing purposes.
But then again, it would still be a tough sell. AOL probably isn't a
great example. They're mainly interested in controlling things, just
like MS....
I would add Route 6: redesign the website.
From the outsider's perspective, it looks like the pages haven't been
changed in a very long time. (I know that's what I thought as an
"outsider" not so long ago :-) The whole site gives the mistaken
impression that the project has stagnated or is not very professional at
all.
The AW product counters all of that, of course. But we still would like
to convince people to download it. To do that, they must think: things
are going on, things are happening, and we're making news.
I'm not talking about a flash-loaded site design, either. I think that a
W3C site that is pleasing to the eye casts a good impression on any
project as a whole as the central hub of communication. For those of us
who have been around Unix and Free Software long enough, we are well
accustomed to great software coming from ugly websites.
But that's not the view of the end user, if the project would really
like to attract many of those people. I guess it's like judging a book
by it's cover. We've all heard the phrase, but it's still the first
reaction we have to a book with an ugly cover.
Please note that I don't think the website is ugly per se. I was just
making a point. How about... It needs some polish and a tighter design.
Mainly, making major design changes would help give an impression that
things aren't dead here. After all, dead projects don't redesign their
pages, but popular projects gearing up for a major release often do such
things.
I would volunteer to help such a project, too....
How about Route 7:
I've been cruising the Internet for hours, and I have not seen one .abw
file. We must give away AW, make it free, and our downloads should flow
like water....
:-)
On 04 Aug 2001 13:34:12 -0500, Jared Davis wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> A couple of nights ago, I had a very interesting discussion with a student
> from Northwest Missouri State university about Abiword. She is an
> accounting major, and I talked to her for a good hour or two asking how she
> would go about marketing Abiword if she had to do so.
>
> She brought up a lot of good ideas that I never would have thought of on my
> own, and our discussion ranged from trying to figure out wha the problems
> would be and good solutions for overcoming them. None of the suggested
> routes may be *the* solution, but they might be worth your time to read, or
> they might not.
>
> As we eventually move towards our 1.0 release, we might be interested in
> working towards getting some of these into place. At the risk of sounding
> like an idiot, I've gone ahead and posted my limited understanding of the
> things she suggested.
>
> This should be thought of as, if anything, a starting point for discussion.
> It may be premature to begin talking about this, but maybe we'll get more
> ideas this way in the long run.
>
> The document's just over four pages, so it should be a quick read.
> http://aiken.clan11.com/abiword/marketing.zabw
>
> Thanks,
> Jared
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Aug 04 2001 - 15:15:41 CDT