[BadVista Advocate] Marketing Campaign

[Don Hensley]

Morton, you have brought out an point I find of interest, that possibly the 
group here would like to give me their thoughts on.

The Information Week article you linked to, (here's a link that will save 
everyone several page jumps):
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=199201179

And the the blog responses at:
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/04/ubuntu_linux_vs.html
Are very interesting because it's hard to find (I didn't find any) real pro 
Vista comments.

I find your wife's comments about the Pardus flavor of GNU/Linux comparing to 
the Vista flavor of Windows, "changing to Vista and changing to Pardus is not 
much different", to be revealing of something I noticed about the Information 
Week article.

In it, and every such article I read, what is happening is that they mostly 
compare GUI's, and not so much the actual OS.

As your wife did --She was actually mostly just comparing Vista to KDE (in the 
Pardus flavor), as the Info Week article is mostly comparing Vista to Gnome 
(in the Ubuntu flavor).

We all know we can choose the Desktop Environment we want (or write our own 
--Freedom isn't an option, for us it's built in).

How many Windows users do you suppose know what we are talking about when we 
talk about the Desktop Environment? Most of them think of it as the 
equivalent of a Windows theme, rather then what it actually is --if they 
think about it at all.

This is one of the things that leads to confusion with Windows vs. GNU/Linux 
comparisons.

Of course they universally miss the point that it is the hardware vendor that 
creates hardware problems. They also conveniently forget to mention the disks 
that came with each peripheral they use with the Windows OS, which provide 
the print drivers, Ethernet card drives, etc. for whatever flavor of Windows 
they are using/installing (including one to set up the Motherboard!).

This false "the GUI==the OS", is actually true on the Windows side also. 
People see the eye candy and feel a "perceived" ease of use. GNU/Linux or 
Vista... it's about how the end user thinks/feels about the system.

We do not qualify as end users. Not to make us anything except what we are, 
geeks to one degree or another. But by definition, we would not be here on 
this list, if we were the average end user --and that is who we must reach 
with our message.

And that's is my point: How do we deal with end user perception?

I have one or two ideas, if anyone else thinks this is as important an issue 
as I think it is, in terms of showing the disadvantages of Vista, and the 
advantages of GNU/Linux, by attempting to create a campaign that deals with 
perception first, and then using that, lead into the technical aspects of 
each OS.

After all, much as it goes against my hacker nature, I can understand that the 
basic problem is in marketing, not technical superiority (if it was just on 
technical merit Windows [also DRM & TC] would already be past history).

Don.
-- 
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