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Re: [LUG] Advertising (or lack of)

 

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:53:29 +0000
David Bell <grimpen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Saturday 19 January 2008 22:03, Neil Williams wrote:
> 
> > 1. Money - who do you think pays for the wages of all those
> > footballers and Hollywood-has-beens? Ads are incredibly expensive,
> > especially for a prime-time blitz on lots of channels / media. M$ have
> > plenty, let them spend it.
> 
> I don't see the relevance of footballers and hollywood-has-beens.

They receive the majority of the advertising budget of
FTSE /NASDAQ companies.

> I'm sure 
> that costs could be kept down by avoiding advertising agencies. 

Ads on the web are easily ignored and removed.

Ads on TV are the only real way of affecting the masses - why else
would the fees be so high?

> Why use 
> television and subsidise all the hangers-on connected with it? There are ways 
> of advertising on the web and printed matter which wouldn't cost an arm and a 
> leg. 

Depends what you are trying to achieve. Conferences are really cheap
advertising. Getting a mass audience involves spending mass-scale
amounts of money.

> Canonical must spend a small fortune distributing disks world wide, why 
> not advertise the fact in the daily/weekly press or whatever?

Nah. CD-R distribution is a tiny spend vs the M$ TV ads over Xmas and
SuperBowl interval etc. and M$ don't even need to advertise - imagine
how much they would spend if free software got more than 25% of the
mass pre-installed market. (Imagine how dirty it would get too.)

> > 2. .... Needs a change of attitude from the manufacturers.
> 
> Manufactures won't change unless they see that there really is a market out 
> there. 

This is a v.dangerous argument because it is how NVidia justify their
proprietary crap. If market share is all that matters, what is the
point of making the source code free?

Freedom is most important - change the attitude *before* the market
share forces a change.

> I notice that including drivers for Mac seems to be on the increase.

i386-Mac - not exactly hard to port proprietary i386-win32 code
compared to making free software that can be ported to ARM, MIPS and a
host of other architectures.

> > 3. Canonical, Sun, HP, RedHat and others do push their names during
> > exhibitions and conference and stuff.
> 
> Preaching mostly to the converted :) 

If it hadn't been for LinuxWorld Expo, I wouldn't be a Debian Developer.

> > More hardware manufacturers need to publish their source code, not just
> > make proprietary binaries for the Linux kernel. That way, we all get
> > stable, free, code for all devices instead of a proprietary mess where
> > the same device name has a different chipset in February to March and
> > the same chipset appears under a random assortment of names.
> 
> A hurdle to overcome by increased usage of OSS.
> 
> > Most of the work needs to be within the scope of the hardware
> > manufacturers and the hardware packagers - *not* the retailers or the
> > ad agencies.
> 
> To hell with "ad Agencies".  Retailers will push what they can sell.  

Agreed. Retailers will only stock the items that customers request -
customers (for better or for worse) are susceptible to ads and ads
generate requests which generate orders which generate stock-on-shelves
which generate sales wich generates more stock-on-shelves.

Customer requests are the best weapon to undermine blinkered OEM
contracts and anti-trust non-disclosure agreements.

> Advertising, making the public aware, in what ever manner is practical and 
> effective, will create a (hopefully growing) demand.  Even your local shop 
> can afford to advertise.

No doubt.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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