[SoaS] [Marketing] SoaS 3 (Mirabelle) release 5/25 & publicity/recruitment plans

[Sean DALY]

Peter,

The incoherence I am talking about is marketing, not engineering. We
had identified e-book readers as key and promoted SoaS that way.
Dropping those six months later is incoherent. Credibility counts.

FOSS marketing (in the sense of targeted marketing, not contributor
recruitment) has a more than spotty record these past 15 years.
Mozilla is one of the very few exceptions; they had sharp marketers
from the start. Look at the enormous difficulty GNU/Linux distros have
had gaining desktop market share. Microsoft's monopoly has played a
key role in that, but so has the absence of effective desktop and
distro marketing. The past is not a guide I'm afraid.

The Fedora limitation I am referring to is: if it's not packaged in
Fedora, it doesn't exist. Sound engineering, but limits what we can do
to simplify trying Sugar for teachers. I agree that this approach will
work better for large deployments, but the issue is we have raised
rather than lowered the installation and unfamiliarity barriers.
Other, complementary approaches are possible; we've discussed an
online pseudo-Sugar interface, to attack the unfamiliarity barrier.

I fully agree that the Microsoft model where marketing hands over
tasks to engineering doesn't work. However, effective marketing is not
a list of tasks to be done with what engineering hands over, either.
It's a strategy, developed with the education mission in mind, with
input from all teams. This is the outside the box thinking that we
need to do.

We have a critical resources problem at SL (developers, packagers,
deployers, testers, marketers too) and spreading the word about Sugar
is one way to attract talent.

Sean


On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sean,
>
> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Sebastian,
>>
>> Our problem is the incoherence between the two previous versions of
>> SoaS and this one, and the incoherence with our marketing strategy
>> which is to promote a rich ecosystem of Activities for which Sugar is
>> the support.
>
> I'm sorry, I didn't see much coherence between version 1 and version
> 2.... so not sure how we can continue that with version 3. Its a young
> project that is growing and maturing. I remember v2 as being massively
> unstable and needing 12 different respin versions of it to get
> something that was stable. Sebastian did a absolutely brilliant job
> but I remember him respinning it momentarily before it was announced
> at FUDCon due to some app breakage. SoaS 1 and 2 were rebuilt
> endlessly because so much was broken..... and if you look back to
> Fedora 1 to 2 to 3 there was massive churn..... and I've used "Fedora"
> since RHL 4.0 in 1995 so I do know what I'm talking about there!
>
>> We can't talk about new SoaS features or large
>> deployments, so there isn't news. Trying to get journalists interested
>> in helping us with recruitment will be an uphill climb. We need to
>> reach developers where they are, which is why I've suggested we
>> advertise for volunteer developers as we are quite more likely to
>> obtain recruitment results that way.
>
> So..... there's a couple of points above. One word... evolution....
>
> Large deployments aren't the fault of SoaS v3 .... funnily enough it
> actually needs to be actually released before it can be deployed....
> you seem to miss that point, and the fact that the lack of mass
> deployments doesn't reflect on the upcoming release but the past
> ones.... see point above about stability..... also note the Microsoft
> Windows 7 vs Vista issues.... I know you've referenced that before!
> Sebastian and I personally believe that v3 will be better for large
> deployments because its more stable. That is a feature!
>
> But to address further your point "We can't talk about new SoaS
> features" ...... there are new features..... LOTS..... but not in
> Sugar.... but that's not because of SoaS...... its because of upstream
> Sugar..... We have 3G support... that's a feature. There's massive
> underlying new features we get from Fedora 13.... native IPv6
> anyone???
>
>> And we need to reach educators. The installation and unfamiliarity
>> barriers of Sugar remain too formidable. That's why it's so important
>> to have a SoaS Creation Kit. But, we're bumping up against Fedora
>> limitations there. I am sure it has been a positive tradeoff from an
>> engineering point of view, but I am not at all sure from a wider
>> education-mission point of view.
>
> So where is this famed "SoaS Creation Kit" ???? And its not fricken
> well Fedora limitations.... they reach millions of people and then
> they use the same tools that RHEL and Centos and Oracle unbreakable
> whatever uses..... and what's more they don't need some half arsed
> boot CD thing which I've never been able to make work let alone
> use....
>
>> Why don't we discuss this tomorrow in the marketing meeting? Hopefully
>> we can improve cooperation between the SoaS and Marketing teams, which
>> has been abysmal lately.
>
> No! lets not discuss it tomorrow. This release has been in this state
> for months and you leave it to the Fedora release date to ask for
> discussion about it..... I'm sorry you've missed the boat. Lets
> discuss it for the next release after this one comes out in a couple
> of weeks so we can try and work with you for SOAS-4. You keep
> mentioning that "I've disagreed with this and that" but on the SoaS
> list I've not seen any of the discussion..... and that is what we're
> talking about here.....
>
>> (By the way: I've mentioned previously that there are several reasons
>> why it's not a good idea to cite journalists by name on public lists;
>> it's better to cite their publications. In particular, some
>> journalists are curious about what is said about them, and on most
>> lists someone manages to have something nasty to say about a given
>> article, which doesn't help.)
>
> So this is documented in a wiki article with regards to marketing
> somewhere? I've lived with marketing people for 5 years.... I worked
> for a leading edge marketing company for half of that. But people
> forget things and things get lost in mailing lists.... you as the
> current marketing lead person should document the strategy somewhere
> (like the Fedora guys do) just in case for some reason suddenly your
> no longer here (my boss asked me today whether I had an urge to jump
> in front of a tube train....... life happens).
>
> Sean.... the problem that I have with Sugar marketing (is that just
> you?) is that you go "I've spoken about this" "i've mentioned this
> isn't good" but having watched open source VERY closely for 15 years
> and lived with marketing people for 5 years I've never met anyone
> that's just said "No I won't deal with this". GNOME desktop hasn't
> changed massively in the last god knows how many years and they manage
> to market "evolution over revolution" very well, and get all the press
> reviews even if its "the default theme looks nicer than the last" (and
> no that's not a quote).... they manage to use 3G support and stability
> as good features..... upstream Fedora support is a great feature....
> one of the features of SOAS-4 will be a smaller foot print due to
> upstream GNOME.... that should be a good feature due to the 1.5
> million XO-1s.....
>
> Think outside the box.... please don't stick your head in the sand....
> Sugar is evolving.... Soas is evolving... we are barely a toddler....
> Marketing should be dynamic and run with what we have....
>
> To finish.... I've never before been in a situation in my 15 years in
> the tech industry where marketing has refused point blankly to market
> a product that is put in front of them while seeing what is going on
> in front of them and not speak out in the channels to do with that
> product (I've only recently subscribed to the marketing list as SoaS
> talk happens on the SoaS list.... what ever it is). Normally tech has
> to implement the shit that marketing has sold. So if marketing is
> going to dictate without input what SoaS technically should deliver
> you can count me out... I have a lot of stuff on my plate and enough
> to argue about with having to deal with people that are blinkered.
> There are a lot of massive improvements to SOAS-3..... be creative....
> that is (apparently) what your suppose to do.
>
> Peter
>
> BTW I will be at POSSE and RH summit in June and FUDCon in Zurich in
> September if we want to have a SoaS marketing discussion.. and would
> be open to another option.... similar to the Fedora FADs if that helps
> us to articulate and be on the same page.
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