A marketing angle

[Ben F-W]

Robert Michel wrote:
> Salve David, Ben, *!
>   
Hello Robert! Thanks for the thoughts.
> So the Neo1973 is a unique chance to have a big deveoper community :)
> And becouse it is so fantastic - I'm convinced that other people do
> like this plattform as well and it will become populare.
>   
I agree that it's likely to become very popular with a limited market: 
the developers. What I was trying to decide in my email was whether that 
would be enough to guarantee future investment in the platform by FIC - 
and if not, how likely the product was to make it to a larger market. 
Over time, of course, the developers are likely to make interesting 
enough applications to attract the larger market automatically. However, 
when developers are scratching a personal itch (as many of these will 
be) the initial result tends not to be easy enough to use for the mass 
market.
> When the first hundreds or thousands Neo1973 are in the hand of people
> like us, who like to develope,hack,portate,documentate.... :)))))))
> OpenMoko will have enough power to become a plattform for endusers as
> well. And then it could be sold like a PDA, a Linux distribution, or
> any other PC.
>   
You're right that over time, of course, the developers are likely to 
make interesting enough applications to attract the larger market 
automatically. However, when developers are scratching a personal itch 
(as many of these will be) the initial result tends not to be easy 
enough to use for the mass market. Your analogy with a Linux 
distribution is particularly apt here.

Perhaps one route to mass market would be the home interface setup - 
which seems to be what the majority of suggestions have centred around 
on this list. If Asterisk could be made simple enough to package into a 
'black box' that consumers don't have to configure (in the same way 
MythTV is beginning to be), it could be sold in a package with an 
OpenMoko phone or two. That would bring some of the most impressive 
benefits of OpenMoko to the mass market in an easy-to-use form.
> Today, it could be less book more video tutorial, but for the mass
> market documentation would be *very* usefull, to educate the customers
> to use the power of the smartphone....
> And make it easy with softwaresolutions *and* documention to understand,
> how it works and how they could use it.
>   
Can you give an example of a complicated product that has managed to 
reach the mass market by including a video tutorial? I'm not sure the 
average phone user has the inclination to even watch the video, let 
alone set their new product up in accordance with its instructions.

> Would you agree to concentrate first on building a developer community
> and think about "how to promote" the Neo1973 to the mass market, a
> little bit later? 
>   
I think both efforts need to happen in parallel. Yes, the developer 
community definitely needs to be mobilised and enthused about this 
(Sean's done a great job on this already) and your later suggestion 
about collecting together information on AGPS, programming etc is a good 
one. But the developers also need to be pointed in the right direction, 
and I think now is the time to try and work out what direction that 
might be. One emphasis, certainly, should be simplicity: people are so 
used to their phones being simple that a move towards more complex 
options would be more likely to scare than attract (although Gabriel's 
email suggests a way around this). Reliability, too, is vital: "what 
happens if I can't make an emergency call any more?". There, of course, 
Linux has several advantages.

Does anyone have other suggested emphases? Then we can start narrowing 
down possible applications!

Ben