A marketing angle

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Monday 20 November 2006 22:05, Robert Michel wrote:
> But I have doubts what a chipping form TW to Europe will cost. In my

It's depends a lot on how big the package is. The smaller the better. There 
are however organizations which have infrastructure to distribute niche 
products.

> Europe or Germany to help selling the first 500 or 1000 devices - I
> thought a computer magazin like Linux-magazin.de or heise.de/ct could
> like to have an article about OpenMoko/Neo1973 and cooperate with the
> first centralised sales promotion - this would have two effects:
> - the first devices would become cheaper
> - and people got a reason to buy it with this first order
>
> Old selling trick - when the people could buy it all the year, they
> will wait until.... but when there is a unique chance to buy it now...

That is actually a very well known in phenomenon in what has become known as 
behavioral economics [1]: If it's an unique chance to get it, people will 
think of it as a loss when they aren't acting upon it and by far the majority 
is much more sensitive to losses than to gains. And something that is on sale 
for only a short time is commonly framed as a (potentially) missed 
opportunity.


> 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.

Yes. But it might be better, for the beginning anyway, NOT to market it as 
a "phone". People want their phones to ALWAYS work and ensuring that could be 
really though with a moving platform. And if ever got somewhat less stable 
the idea is ruined for those end users affected by it.

> But it could also sold like a book or better, with a book.
> I choosed SuSE as my first Linux distribution about 8 years ago,

Back then it was probably more important (and I DO remember that book :) than 
now but I could agree to it.

> But wait - your audience have to have the will to learn,
> to develope and to use this freedom.
> The others, who just want to have, to own,
> have to wait some month.

Some statement said FIC can produce about 100000 device per month. That should 
be plenty for starters, even for the ones that just want them for use. They 
might not get all features they want immediately but hey, you cant have 
everything.

> 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?

Mokoforge is needed, yes. Are there any plans for that?

> I think at the moment we could use the time to collect some
> informations, about AGPS, programming for embedded devices
> but also about extended AT-commands which will be used for
> communicate with the gsm device.

It's not really what you would commonly associate with an embedded device 
(which is more like a Linksys WRT for me ;-). Hell it got a VGA screen :) 
It's really a very tiny PC that happens to come with GPS and GSM interface... 
So from that angle, it's a little resource constrained but no more than pcs a 
decade ago...



[1] It has been in use a lot longer, but a somewhat formalized concept took a 
while to come into being. Google for Kahneman and Tversky if you wanna know 
more... I guess the years of economics studies are starting to come 
through ;)