[SoaS] [IAEP][DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel

[Sean DALY]

Although it's probable a "Fedora Sugar Spin" would generate press and
lead to downloads, in my view it would be catastrophic to launch that
at the same time as Sugar on a Stick. It would just create confusion.
A separate launch is certainly worth discussing, but I'm interested to
know what the target would be - geeks? more likely than teachers, no?
In that scenario it would be an effective developer recruitment
effort. But beyond the absolute numbers of downloads, what interests
me is the trend - the graphs I saw from Bernie and David showed big
spikes after the Strawberry launch and steady uphill growth every week
since then. I'm afraid we did manage to stress the server at launch,
we were lucky the Chinese sites didn't link to us in their articles.
Marten has been busy organizing mirrors. When I have an
advertising/promotion budget beyond my pocket, I will be able to
coordinate very effective ads in teacher monthlies, and that will
generate press where it matters most (and where Sugar has hardly any,
and Fedora likely none at all).

What concerns me about Fedora marketing is the strategy. I see great
tech, grassroots buildup, the Ambassadors program, but it's not clear
to me what the plan is to increase marketshare, in the general PC
market or in the education market. Are there any OEM discussions?
Perhaps increasing desktop marketshare is not a priority which is fine
of course, but part of the problem I am wrestling with is the weakness
of the distro and desktop brands.

The Sugar branding is designed to play the strengths of Sugar against
the very real weaknesses of Microsoft. And Intel's pay-pay-pay
ecosystem model too (cf.
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-September/002101.html).
Blackboard and the other vertical-market players such as the custom
Windows desktops (EasyBits etc.) are linked to Wintel and are very
pricey compared to Sugar. At the speed Sugar development is going (and
of course distro development and particularly Fedora), Sugar will be a
very real challenger on only a year or two.

I have no illusions about the difficulty of jumpstarting an ecosystem,
but since that is necessary to the success of Sugar, we need to make
it happen. I have ideas for plans for that too; I have worked in a
startup environment and seen how it is indeed possible to start slow,
build momentum, then scale with a breakout. The key to that I think
will be FOSS system integrators targeting schools, working to displace
Wintel box movers where there are not overarching contracts. Work on
the XS/Moodle integration is key to that I think. That pilots are
small doesn't matter; Dell developed and tested their education
netbook (http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-May/001026.html)
in one Texas and one UK school.

Sean


On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you Martin. I think that is spot on!
>
>>> We've been a distro distributor for months - from the before the
>>> beta-1 Sugar on a Stick announcement.
>>
>> Who's we?  sugaronastick.com?  Sugar Labs members?  Let's be clear:
>> Sugar Labs does not have the staff to compete with Canonical or Fedora
>> as a distro vendor.  So please help me understand to what "distro
>> distributor" tasks you think the DP should propose to SLOB.
>
> It would be interesting to see how many people are using SoaS over
> something like the installable options from the distros such as the
> sugar desktop group option in Fedora. This obv wouldn't include the
> XO-1s. Of the 5 devices I have that have sugar installed. 2 are the
> 802 XO release, and 3 are Fedora (although one of those will go to
> SoaS for some testing eventually).
>
>>> And, we are marketing it with success (cf. worldwide tech press
>>> coverage, the BBC, etc).
>>
>> How many people are using it?  Satisfied with SoaS as a distro?
>> What's the target deployment size, and what SL support will be
>> required?
>
> I would think not massive amounts. Do we have download stats of SoaS.
> If so how many, what regions etc. Any idea off demographic or
> deployments?
>
>> I'm not saying it can't be done.  I'm saying I don't see any agreement
>> on what it is or who's going to do it.  Without that we should...
>>
>>> We can do this because we are very, very careful not to overpromise.
>>
>> ...not overpromise :).
>>
>>> Part of our work is to jumpstart a support ecosystem.
>>
>> To the extent this impacts SoaS, this sounds like wishful thinking.
>> Who's doing this?  With what plan?  What targets are there?  Why do we
>> believe they'll be met?
>
> I know from trying to get a grass roots group together in the UK this
> is very hard. There's a small core group doing the pilot and a dozen
> or so others that show up on occasion. From my observation its not
> that different on the olpc and sugar tech mailing lists (I'm not on
> iaep but we are after all talking about creating a distro ). You see
> the same group of people posting to the list all the time. You then
> get the occasional drive by asking a question.
>
>>> It's certainly not easy, but it's not impossible, in my view.
>>
>> "Not impossible" covers a lot of ground.  What happened to not
>> overpromising :).
>
> I would like to see some stats. Who has access to the download stats
> of "SoaS Strawberry". I would almost bet that I could create an
> official Fedora Spin called "Fedora Sugar Spin" for the Fedora 13
> release and get it on their main download site and get almost as many
> downloads as SoaS and with the combination of SugarLabs and Fedora
> marketing get as much or even more press coverage.
>
> Peter
>