Slashdotted

Steve Mosher steve at openmoko.com
Tue Apr 7 01:17:42 CEST 2009



Fernando Martins wrote:
> Steve Mosher wrote:
>> Thanks Anthony.
>>
>> For the sake of everyone who hasnt read my posts on this
>> or seen the video of seans speech. Let me say that your position
>> is the one we settled on. spend our resources on the FR and then
>> fund a modest project: project B. Put the GTA03 on hold
>> and find a way to involve the community more in its development.

>>
>>   
> I'm not a marketing guy, but I am somewhat surprised not to see more 
> references about this aspect. There is talk about products and about 
> methods. All that discussion on hardware development made it clear that 
> OM needs to increase market or gain share to achieve economies of scale. 
> I can understand that market aspects might not come to the front, but 
> maybe the community could also help here.
First and foremost I try to get the word out to the community. For that 
I try to talk about the engineering aspects of things, as best I can 
since I put my complier down years ago. Then I discuss the marketing 
aspects of things. Search my posts and you'll find the comments on 
marketing. yes, its true we need to increase market share. My job
is to size what I think is reasonable. To fund GTA03 I would have to
TRIPLE sales overnight. If you look at the economic drivers in our 
channel, basically it cash constrained at the inlet, you'll understand 
why I would not project a tripling of volume. Further, increasing the 
sales this much overnight would not even be feasible from a cash flow 
standpoint. It takes money to buy inventory and to market. So, I picked
a more modest growth projection. A projection based on our entry to the 
Embedded market. Thousands of developers who never even heard of us.
ramping to volume is only possible by a reallocation and yes de 
allocation of resources from certain areas. And you are right the 
community can help:
  1. get code upstream. That decreases our cost to maintain.
  2. Stay involved or get involved, either by coding, testing, or
     spreading the word.
  you get the idea.
> 
>  From another post I understand that you are also going to niche markets 
> that need custom/open phones, which looks like a sensible approach. But 
> could the GTA02 be made interesting to the general public to be sold 
> together with a telecom subscription? if not, is there a GTA02+ that 
> could do it?
  The telecom play is a tough one.

  1. The tests you have to go through cost on the order of 700K
  2. Your CUSTOMER is really the product marketing manager of the telco.
     They are driven to monetize the 3G network they set up. They are
     not especially dedicated to open source as an ideal.

  The niche market play is one where we see the most traction. If I want 
to ramp to volume, I'm going to pick the hill where I have traction and
not the slippery slope of a telco play. Crawl, walk run.
> 
> I have the impression that people are already using the phones in many 
> different ways. Some do it in obvious ways for them which might not be 
> so obvious to the majority. How about collecting these use cases and see 
> how you can grow the current specific FR market from here, or gain 
> market share from the general phone market.
Yup that's our impression and the plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d8Tsvj2TdQ

Our launch into these areas happened march 31st

WRT the general phone market, I'd say we are content to have the android 
distribution cover that demand. That effort is being carried out 
independently of us. I see that as pure upside business. In brazil for 
example, we see a market for 13 million android phones. Do I put this in 
my forecast? No. Will our business change overnight if it materializes?
yes.
> 
> Regards,
> Fernando
> 




More information about the community mailing list