Again: Advertising thoughts

[Richard Reichenbacher]

You need to think about the average everyday human being here.  If you've
ever worked help desk you might have a general understanding of how very
little your average person knows about computers.  Hell even most of the IT
people I've worked with had little to no  idea what Linux is all about.  So
when advertising to the mass market, saying that it's based on GNU/Linux
means absolutely nothing to these people.  The more complicated it sounds to
them, the less likely they are to buy it.

 

One of the most alluring things about the iPhone is that you can give it to
ANYBODY and within minutes they will be able to use just about every feature
of the phone, even if there aren't all that many.  If this phone is going to
make it in the real world then it needs to be useable and enjoyable to use,
by everyone from Linus Torvalds himself, to Joe Bloe the milkman that never
owned a cell phone before in his life and it needs to marketed the same way.
Just about everyone in the open source community already knows about
OpenMoko and what it's capable of, next step is letting the rest of the
world know.

 

Richard

 

From: community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org
[mailto:community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org] On Behalf Of Jae Stutzman
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 4:55 PM
To: community
Subject: Re: Again: Advertising thoughts

 


Just one thing: the general public doesn't even know the word "Linux". 



I don't really agree with the stance that Linux is a bad word here and I
don't think that it is bad to associate with "Linux". Microsoft has been
pushing Windows Mobile for years to try to leverage their so-called easy to
use OS as compared with Palm. Not that Linux is the all powerful word to use
to get people on board either. But to say that openmoko is built on Linux
(or GNU/Linux for the truly hardcore) is generally a positive thing because
Linux is the embodiment of open and free in the current computing world. The
thing that must be stressed is that the phone is open, not closed, both in
speech and in beer. 

One more thing. I'd agree that people watching TV commercials may not know
what Linux is (except for those IBM ads a few years ago). But youtube
ads...come on, most have at least heard about that non-Microsoft thing! 


Jae

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