Marketing Message for Calligra

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 22 December 2011 17:47, Cyrille Berger Skott <cberger at cberger.net> wrote:
> On Thursday 22 December 2011, Inge Wallin wrote:
>> With due respect, I think you are totally wrong here.  It never pays off
>> in  marketing to be humble.  Really, what do you hope to achieve (or avoid
>> for that matter) by being humble?
> It also never pay off to brag. And I want to avoid Calligra to be know like
> KOffice as the suite of application that promises wonder and deliver nothing.

So I am looking at a way out from the 'competing on desktop' ghetto.
There are real strengths that we do not show so far.

> You can make all the fun you want of LibreOffice attempt to port to Android, but
> if you go outside of the Calligra community, people perceive us as the people
> who have been trying for 14 years to deliver an office suite for the desktop.

So we escape from that desktop in the mid term.

> And now, we will start bragging to be leading on the free office suite market
> for mobile, and if you scratch under the surface, you will discover that we
> are positionned on a dead tiny fraction of that market.

MARKET is not the only area where competition can occur. SQLite found
its niche as being well hidden component - even few geeks know it's
the most used database engine on the _market_. It clearly leads in its
niche. Yet the authors who DISCLAIM all the copyright, are clearly
leaders and very known hackers in certain circles.

> By being humble, I am hopping to avoid damaging the Calligra brand to the
> extend the KOffice brand had been.

KOffice/Calligra on desktop needs order of magnitude more investment
do be interesting for users. But even then _interesting_ is not a
reason to switch. 'Much better' is.

> And don't misunderstand me, I think we should be proud that Calligra is used
> on the N9, it is a good achievement, and we should go around and talk about
> that. However lets avoid to create a mountain out of a mouse.
>
> Merging an other email, since it is on the same topic:
>> I know it's sometimes laughable, but the reason people do it is because it
>> *works*.  All marketing textbooks say "you need to find a niche where you are
>> the leader and then tell everybody about it".
>
> I am also hoping that every marketing textbook start by telling you to define
> who is your target. And to adjust your message for them.

For me the current calligra.org addresses nonexisting audience: people
that still wait for their office suite so much that they don't mind
existence of missing features. Audience that cares what toolkit runs
in the apps or what. I found out that in turn these people are
typically not users of the office suite.

> Assuming our marketing target is geeky technical people, who know and follow
> open source project.

No, for them a simple README would be enough. Custom office
technologies are not that interesting for these people - if they need
to accomplish their tasks they are already users of LO or working for
years with VBA.

> Those people get suspicious with excessive "bragging",
> and while they know of the N9xx Maemo/Meego, they also know it is a very niche
> stillborn market. And will go and think, yeahyeah, they are the leader of
> nothing (and if they know from where Calligra comes from, they will think that
> people never change).

Let them look at the results and compare. If we're 20% done AND LO or
AbiWord, etc. is at 5%, we ARE clear liders. In the end of day you
won't convince trolls or anti-C++ or pro-HTML5 guys.

> Worse, if our target is outside of that group, chance is that they don't know
> much about "free software", or meego and the N9.

There's no FSF logo. 'Leader' is also not from FSF's their
'vocabulary'. The target is clearly people that have specific needs
that that can be fulfilled with our solutions, people like the smart
guys from SKF.

> All they know is iphone and
> the cheap version of iphone (some of them know that it is called android). For
> them "the leading free office suite for mobile", free will translate to 0€,
> "mobile" translate to iOS or Android, and since it is available to neither, we
> are just liars.

'Buy 2, get 3'?

We don't propose to hide the information and don't try to fool people.
I am convinced that if we focus on niches (at least first) we can
declare we're leaders there simply because we are.

Just an idea: the 'leaders' sentence can be a hyperlink...

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)