[Sugar-devel] [SoaS] SOAS-3: Final Activity List - Attention needed!

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the contrary, the wide press coverage we had last June was because
> we baptized SoaS-2 as "v1" (reread the BBC article for example). v2
> had less coverage, which was to be expected; so the objective there
> was to underline Sugar's e-book readers. Mirabelle has neither of
> James Simmons' Get Books or Get Internet Archive Books.

That doesn't make SoaS-2 as v1, v2 had less coverage? They conflict!

Again if those two activities were the major sticking point I didn't
see you step up to help test them or get resources to do so. In fact
the first I heard of those two activities was last week when someone
asked why they weren't there!

> Again, I have no quarrel with any effort to make Sugar on a Stick more
> stable or reliable, in the time it takes. My objection is the use of
> the v3 marketing number. A major opportunity to spread the word will
> be wasted if that number is used for Mirabelle - journalists review
> v3's throroughly. Sugar on a Stick has been a central pillar of our
> marketing strategy, so the loss of that number means changing our
> strategy (and quite possibly with lower probability of a breakout).
> It's a pity.
>
> Sugar on a Stick has two roles: in production and as a teacher demo.
> This second role shouldn't be underestimated - the two greatest
> barriers to Sugar adoption are its unfamiliarity and difficulty of
> installation. Mirabelle is an excellent solution for the first role,
> but very unfortunately is not suited to the second. Our marketing
> strategy is designed to make trying Sugar as easy as possible. And,
> teachers care about content, not platforms. Our rich Activity
> ecosystem is the draw for the platform.

I completely disagree. Firstly I doubt very much Mirabelle will be
used in production without customisation. I know of many people
demoing sugar to teachers using sugar on a stick and never touching
the included books that were included in v2. Simply because the
particular ones of are no use to them. All the content they use is
acquired elsewhere and accessed via a usb stick. This is completely
different in 'production' where the teachers/schools/government select
special content for the deployment.

> Although it may be traditional in FOSS projects to think of marketing
> as an afterthought, that's a recipe for failure - it has everything to
> do with why the distros and their desktops have such terribly low
> market share (and brand awareness), even after years of existence.
> There's no reason Sugar should share that fate, we just need to work
> more closely together.

Yet I disagree again. Look at Ubuntu. Look a RedHat Enterprise Linux.
Neither are a failure. In fact in the hosting company I work for Linux
(slightly) outnumbers windows. How is that a failure. Different market
yes, failure its not.

Anyway I'm sick of arguing the point. You clearly don't want to do the
marketing job for all the hard work. Nor do you want to do any
testing. I look forwarding to seeing your testing and feedback for the
particular Activities you think are important for soas-4 so that you
might well market that. Pity it will be 12 months since the last one.

Peter