[ANSOL-geral]Commentary: What Linux needs most (it's not more features)

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Commentary: What Linux needs most (it's not more features)
Saturday March 02, 06:04 AM EST   [ GNU/Linux ]
- By Elwin Green -

I've had an epiphany. Let me tell you how it happened. My wife brings home
an issue of Newsweek (the January 28 issue, to be exact), and I'm browsing
through it, and it flips open to a big ad, a two-page spread with a nice,
clean look that attracts the eye. In this case, my eyes are drawn to a
banner headline, which reads: "A special message to Windows users: Welcome."
And I see a series of paragraphs with boldface headings that say, "Myth 1,"
and "Fact," then "Myth 2" and "Fact," and so on. My heart skips a beat
because my very first, hopeful thought is, "An ad for Linux?!?"

Nah. It's an ad for the Mac. Or rather, the iMac. And as it turns out, it's
not just two pages; it's 12 full pages of seductively well-designed text and
graphics. And when I realize that it's not an ad for Linux, I feel somewhat
sad, because in that same moment I realize that it couldn't be an ad for
Linux; that I will probably never see such a thing, because Linux does not
have a marketing department.

Which led to the epiphany: Linux needs a marketing department.

Since buying my first distro nearly two years ago, I have consistently been
both amused and amazed by talk about Linux achieving "world domination," or
"winning the desktop." I don't know what world those who say such things
inhabit, but in the world I see, it'll never happen; in part because Linux
does not have a marketing department.

This is where some might reply, "So what? Word of mouth is the best
advertising anyway."

Perhaps. But I'm not talking about advertising. I'm also not talking about
sales. I'm talking about marketing, which is different from advertising and
is more than sales. It is the entire educative process by which a seller
engages prospects in hopes of making a sale.

The key word there is "educative." The lack of a marketing department means
there's no group of people whose job, whose paid profession, is to educate
the world about Linux.

And this is the "so what" -- that single Newsweek ad will probably educate
more people about the iMac than five years of word-of-mouth would. Why?
Because word-of-mouth typically expresses enthusiasm or exasperation, but it
rarely educates.

That is the realm of marketing. And in the absence of marketing, the growth
of Linux is stifled by ignorance and fear.

By ignorance, I don't mean cluelessness about using the command line. I mean
ignorance of the very existence of Linux. True story: I'm at a party, and a
friend of mine starts telling me about a stock he's holding that has lost
value. He expects it to regain ground, so he thinks I might do well to buy
it at its beaten-down price. The company is called Red Hat Linux. When he
says that, I start talking enthusiastically about the OS - but I don't get
far before my friend's face goes blank, and I realize he doesn't even know
what Linux is. He just owns some Red Hat stock.

Many people still do not know what Linux is. People who don't know what it
is certainly won't go to the trouble of displacing Windows to make room for
it on their PCs.

And then, for those who have heard of Linux, there's the fear. Or perhaps I
should say, the fears. What if it doesn't work? Where do I go for help?
Isn't Linux hard to use? Etc.

People who have never heard of Linux, or who fear Linux, will never try
Linux.

So maybe, just maybe, what Linux needs most, right now, is a group of people
whose job it is to tell the world about Linux, and to tell the world why
they needn't be afraid of it.

In other words, a marketing department.

Have you noticed that I keep referring to "the world?" I'm not talking about
individual Linux users "advocating" with their co- workers, bosses or
spouses. I'm talking about a group of people with expertise and a budget,
educating (and, I may as well say it, seducing) everyone in the world who
picks up a copy of Newsweek, with a well-designed ad extolling the virtues
of Linux, even as it debunks the myths.

And doing the same thing with everyone in the world who picks up a copy of
Time Magazine. Or who watches an episode of "Frasier" or "Friends."

Yes, I've seen IBM's ads -- a couple of them, anyway. There's the basketball
spot, in which a team with players like "Server" and "Mainframe" is improved
by a new player named "Linux," whom the owners acquired for next to nothing
because "he just loves to play the game." Then there's "The Heist," the
mini-drama in which the mysterious disappearance of an entire floor of
computers turns out to be the work, not of a criminal, but of an in-house
geek who has replaced them all with a single Linux-based server.

The IBM ads are cute. But the basketball one is an inside joke; to get it,
you have to know more about Linux than the average person does. It doesn't
educate -- and one of the questions a marketing department would deal with
is, "How well can a 60-second commercial educate people about Linux?" (My
guess would be, "not very.") And "The Heist" is an ad for IBM's server, not
for Linux itself. There are no ads for Linux, because there's no marketing
department to produce them. It's not IBM's job to market Linux.

It's not anybody's job. And that's the problem. Solutions, anyone?

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in http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/01/1555254
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