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Stealing Apple’s thunder?
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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I couldn’t help but notice that the Apple camp is having a big shindig today with some announcements that the press and fan blogs are salivating over. I’ve noted a number of times — Apple gets far more coverage in the mainstream and tech press than its market share alone warrants, which in turn seems to be helping drive interest in Apple and increasing the company’s market share. How do we learn from the Cupertino crowd and get the same effect?
Many people credit Apple’s success with creating a slick operating system, and sexy hardware — but they forget that Apple has always been a press darling, even before they unveiled OS X, the iPod, and even their first rebound success, the iMacs. Might be hard to remember, but the iPod has only been around since 2001, the fruit-colored iMacs launched in 1998, and OS X in 2001 as well.
So, what is it that Apple has that other tech companies don’t — and, more importantly, what could the Linux community do to capture the same kind of attention, or can we?
Part of Apple’s media savvy is its exclusiveness — Apple holds its cards close to the vest, and its playing “hard to get,” makes it more interesting.
Obviously, it’s hard to do that for a Linux distro — everything is out in the open, so there’s no real opportunity for a big unveil.
So, I’m curious — what could we do to build the same kind of excitement about Linux (in general) and openSUSE (specifically) with the press to push Linux in front of users who aren’t familiar with Linux, who haven’t yet tried Linux, but might be willing and/or interested?
it’s hard because we don’t see linux anywhere, except linux magazine….
there are no pub in tv, radio, magazine
apple we see pub everywhere….
many notebook like eee go out.. only the hp will use suse…. and the hp is not really the top …. very slow cpu
The whole problem comes down to 2 things, slick look, and ease of use. I would also argue that they offer features that people haven’t heard of before. But Linux has been doing this for a long time but doesn’t try to get credit for it. What really needs to be done is that we need to give a demo to the general public about what SUSE (and linux in general can do) I hate to say this next line, but it’s true. KDE 4 looks way better than Gnome, and it needs to be shown off. We need to show the things that can be done in Linux, and stress the point that it’s free software. That it looks great, and that Linux isn’t about the command line anymore. But, the main problem we have now is that a majority of apples market is Ipod, which Linux has nothing on, iphone, which linux can’t face yet and finally laptops, which linux can do great in, but wireless support has to improve.
What really brought Apple to where they are today is design and marketing - marketing most importantly.
No matter how good Macs might have been in the 90s, as long as nobody tried them, nobody saw that. Now, the ‘Mac and PC’ TV spots are something entirely different…
Linux in general suffers from a lack of exposure. But no wonder: There are no appropriate returns to be expected for any of the big Linux vendors from launching a several-million-dollar-campaign on the mass-market. Novell cannot expect to re-finance a big marketing campaign like Apple’s from the sale of openSUSE boxes.
What might work is public exposure. We could lobby public places like libraries and community centers to use a shiny, 3D-enabled openSUSE desktop instead of that bland Windows XP thang. But I don’t know what we could bribe them with, they lean towards not changing a running system…
The only thing we’ve really got going for Linux in marketing-terms is its low entry-price.
(Yeah, yeah; how new…) ‘Viral marketing’ is very much what one could do with openSUSE. How about flooding the world with nice CDs in green cardboard? (Though my environmental conscience tries to interverne here.)
Hmmmm… Just thought a bit about how one could generate more interest. What seems to work well with the public is indeed creating suspense. Apple does it with the famous keynotes. I belive Sony did it in Japan with barcodes on billboards that one had to scan in with a mobile phone of theirs in order to win a price or something. Perhaps one could arrange a similar scavenger hunt for SUSE, green placards containing hints, the cardboars on CDs spelling a word if enough of them are put together in the right sequence (the word ‘SUSE’ wouldn’t be very original, no…), or even better gimmics on the desktop after starting Life CDs. You know, like the numbers on Pepsi cans that were good for a free song from iTunes or these numbers in children’s sweets which lead to a Flash-animated kiddie-game when entered on an internet-site of the vendor.
Hard to say. A question is whether we actually want to go where Apple is. If the price to pay is behaving like Apple then I’d say we definitely don’t.
While their products are certainly quite nice, their practices aren’t.
I don’t know. It’s just totally different. The whole “Mac culture” marketing lie is centered around Steve Jobs. Even if we had someone as pseudo-”charismatic”, what/whom would that person represent ? openSUSE ? Linux (as an operating system, not just the kernel) ? FSF/GNU ? (the latter with all its contradictions with RMS spitting on opensource ?)
The Linux ecosystem is just a lot richer than Apple’s in terms of developers, diversity of interests, etc…
So what’s the trick ? I’m sure not everyone in the “Linux community” (which doesn’t really exist but for the sake of simplicity..) would agree with aggressive marketing in order to spread usage. Usage of what ? openSUSE ? Linux in general ? FOSS ?
So that brings us back to our own level, openSUSE.
A key element here, and something I appreciate a lot about Zonker’s approach, is to avoid pushing openSUSE at the expense of other distributions. It’s pointless, the “market” is big enough for everyone (= all Linux distros), and we’ll all gain a lot more from collaborating. And there’s a huge amount of work in that area (collaboration, that is).
So whom are our worst opponents when it comes to marketing ? No, I don’t even think it’s Microsoft and their FUD campaigns. After all, they’re FUDding everyone else in the IT business, be it IBM, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Apple, and whatnot. I think that the “clueless zealots” category harms us a lot more than one might think. They should not be tolerated, as they harm our collective passion and work for FOSS/Linux/openSUSE/freedom/better software/whatever your motivation is.
Getting back to the point. I don’t think Apple-alike marketing can be done without an insane budget. One would need commercials in magazines and on TV.
Oh well, chicken/egg.
But would we want that in the first place ? Possibly. Are we ready to take the big crowd by the hand and help them making their first steps into openSUSE ? I don’t think so. The last years, the turnover in terms of active contributors on support channels (IRC, mailing-lists, forums) is a lot worse than before. Nothing surprising though, as there’s a lot more “I’m-trying-openSUSE-coz-I-hate-XP/Vista” and “coz-it’s-free” (as in free beer) crowd than in the past.
I, for myself, would tend to think that making it easier for highly motivated people to join our effort by contributing is a key item to growth. As well as s/distrowars/collaboration/g
No, I’m definitely not suggesting we try to be Like Apple when it comes to their lock-in tactics. I suppose a better way to phrase it is — how do we make freedom and open source as sexy as hermetically sealed software?
We’ve go a prototypical chicken-egg problem here. No interest because of low adoption numbers. Low adoption numbers because no one’s interested.
We can’t steal any thunder until we’ve got some brand recognition. Until we’re enough of a household name that we have something to build off of, we’re stuck being in the fringe of desktop adoption.
It’s not that we don’t have amazing technologies in place now. It’s just nobody knows. And if nobody knows then nobody cares. It will take simple marketing to get to the place that anybody will know. Then we hit them with a giant dose of the awesome.
It looks to me like a fundamental lack of leadership is preventing us from getting there. Anybody have an idea who could pull that off?
A different but (I think) related question - Why is it the common perception that switching from Windows to Mac is no problem since Mac is so wonderful, but switching from Windows to Linux is hard because Linux is so arcaic?
This becomes even more confusing when I consider the fact that Linux tries harder to be like Windows than Mac does.
Maybe part of the problem is that, in general, Linux gives the impression that it is trying to be equal with Windows while Mac gives the impression that it is better than Windows.
I do think several things are working in the favor of Linux, though.
Linux functionality is overall equal to or better than Windows
Linux features are overall equal to or better than Windows
Both Mac and Windows have helped people be more open to alternatives to Windows
How can we take advantage of this? We definitely need more marketing, but what kind?
I think (personal opinion) we need to do at least the following:
focus on the positives
- show people what is good about Linux
- release note style marketing does not work very well here since it usually lists all known problems; being open is one thing, but advertising warts is another
- don’t be childish; being negative about a competitor does not inspire people to switch to using your product
show intelligence
- humor is good, if done right
- professionalism shows intelligence and is appreciated
use technology to our advantage
- good Youtube videos can help out with popularity
- blogs already are used, maybe can be used even more
- use search engine rankings to your advantage; find out common searches for Windows problems and build websites that 1) solve problem, 2) rank high, 3) positively promote Linux
Well, there are probably many other ideas out there, and many that are better. I do think that whatever the solutions are will take work and time.