Engineering Driven vs. Community Driven (was Re: Ugliness)

Flemming Richter Mikkelsen quatrox at gmail.com
Tue Apr 29 20:03:40 CEST 2008


On 4/29/08, Lowell Higley <higleylh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >I mean marketing is really just "how to sell"....<SNIP>
> That statement could not be farther from the truth, IMHO.  I think any Tech
I agree 100% with Lowell.

When I think of marketing I think of Apple and Google. Apple is for some
specific group of people while Google manage to reach all. Why?

It is not because Google is free. Try to compare OpenOffice with m$ office.
M$ office gets its users because it's pushed on us (huge availability and
commenly known).

Google engineered what the market requested. They found out what
people wanted and how to give it to them. I remember that I started using
the search engine because someone recommended it to me. This was many
years ago... other people recommended me other search engines. Some
might be better, but Google is good enough so I do not change right now.

I have no idea about marketing, but I like Steve's idea about open
marketing. If we show the phone to many people, some of them might get
interested. I started using Linux because a friend of me told me about it.

If Openmoko should get out to x million people, I think we all need to work
together. Remember it is in our own interest to make Openmoko survive.
Showing off the phone would make a difference. If we want to show
something to non-hackers, we (the community) needs to develop a a lot
of nice software, so that people say "Wow! I want that feature!".

I remember my friend told me that he don't care about what his phone
is able to do, as long as it is slim, long battery capacity and that he is
able to send/receive calls/SMS. Now I wonder, which features would
be so valuable that he would not care about the physical design? If the
phone was also a nitendo wii? Well, then it is up to us, the community,
to implement software that makes the phone work as a nitendo wii.
Only this way will garantee success.

Lack of features in hardware (e.g. camera) must be compensated for in
software (e.g. image drawing programs and support for sending/receiving
images).

If Openmoko survives, we could get more open firmware and GPL'ed
drivers. If Openmoko gets 1% of the mobile market, they can start to
push companies into GPL.




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