Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Marketing list on forums? Marketing team discussion.

Hi :)
I think there are quite a few people that on the list do a lot more than what you see on-list.  We 
have seen some great posters from various countries in different languages that talk about events 
and local strategies.  

LO is an excellent product but it seems that some powerful people on the central list don't quite 
appreciate LO.  The message from them is somewhat less than inspiring.  The best thing about LO is 
not that it's free, nor that it's largely voluntary work that produces it.  

Both those things are extra-ordinary but also deeply misunderstood and undervalued by outsiders, by 
the people we need to inspire and entice into using LO.  We need to hear good reasons for using LO 
but all we hear is excuses about why it would be ok for LO to be rubbish!  We can't market a 
product based on excuses!  

Yes, after people have been using LO for a little while if they were to then be surprised to learn 
those 2 things about LO then it might prove to be a clincher.  They are extraordinary things about 
this project but they sound more like excuses, apologising in advance!  I don't think we need to 
apologise or make excuses.  We can sell LO on quality.  Quality of output.  


At work i use LO because it produces much higher quality output faster and if a client wants 
changes then they are easier to incorporate.  

At work my colleagues all have MS Publisher, MS Office 2007 and 2010 but documents produced by any 
of them are pretty low quality.  It's a bit of a struggle, even impossible, to get funders logos 
neatly spaced on a letter or to get images on a poster to look half-way decent.  You just have to 
accept non-arty gaps or overlaps or lines of 3 where you cannot get the middle one in the middle.  
Precise placement of images is almost impossible.  Then just after spending hours trying to get 
things nicely placed someone looks at it on another machine or/and adds or tries to move something 
and suddenly text and images jump around madly and really mess up the poster or footer = so things 
get rejected or horrible stuff gets passed just because there is not enough time to produce left.  
Then Pdf-ing it makes a horrible swirly mess.  

By contrast, using LO i just plonk things down carelessly, even haphazardly and then drag images 
around just a little and things almost magically line-up or space out evenly.  That's just with 
Writer, not even Draw!  There are more options for how to Anchor, wrap, add comments and make 
images clickable.  For our newsletter the Table-of-Contents practically writes itself.  When i Pdf 
it the T-o-C is clcikable unlike Pdfs from almost anyone else.  Pdfs can be high quality and 
another option  improves accessibility.  


If we are going to 'sell' LO then i think we should focus on the quality of the output more than 
anything else.  

That seems to be where LO really seriously out-performs MSO or even some 'DTP' packages such as 
Publisher.  

UI arguments, usability and all that might be better AFTER you have played around with LO for a bit 
but MS fans  now seem to prefer the infamous ribbon-bar (even though they can't find anything) to 
the menu system.  


So how can we not focus on quality??  Why do we try to use excuses to sell?  Why not use the major 
advantages?

Regards from
Tom :)  


--- On Fri, 12/10/12, Charles-H. Schulz <charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org> wrote:

From: Charles-H. Schulz <charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Marketing list on forums? Marketing team discussion.
To: "marketing@global.libreoffice.org" <marketing@global.libreoffice.org>
Date: Friday, 12 October, 2012, 23:29

One more thing : I expect that after Berlin we will change the focus of
this marketing list  to a more task based mailing list. Right now the list
is not productive and has no focus, and we need to change that. In this
context I would very wellsee the forum working as a "catchall" suggestions
and ideas for Libreoffice and marketing. What do you think?

Best,

Charles.
Le 13 oct. 2012 00:24, "Cor Nouws" <oolst@nouenoff.nl> a écrit :

> Marc Paré wrote (12-10-12 21:50)
>
>   My proposal is that we test-try for a few months with leaving both
> > mailing list and forums (I would suggest 9 months to a year).
>
> +1
> - thanks for working on this!
>
>
>
> --
>   - Cor
>   - http://nl.libreoffice.org
>   - www.librelex.org
>
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