Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Re: Brochure-type: General Information

On 05/10/2013 10:44 AM, Marc Paré wrote:
> Le 10/05/13 09:52 AM, Tom Davies a écrit :
> > Hi :)
> > I was just saying that if you try to sell a used car then pointing at 
> > the flat tyres and saying the wheels are great is not likely to 
> > result in a good sale.
> >
> > Selling Base for what it is good for shows people how much more 
> > advanced and powerful LibreOffice is.
> >
> > Trying to sell Base for what Access is good for (and the 1 thing that 
> > Base is bad at) is a bit dismal.  It underplays our hand. Why compete 
> > with MS when we can change the conversation and by doing so be sooo 
> > far ahead.
> > Regards from
> > Tom :)
>
> Tom,
>
> first off, Base is being worked on by at least one dev. Unfortunately, 
> it is not an attractive code that invites people to work on. So, one 
> of our jobs as marketers is try to attract more competent devs to help 
> out with the Base code ... this will be done in our "Developer 
> brochure" ... we can at least help the dev group in trying to secure 
> devs for the Base module.
>
> Second, we need to stop thinking of LibreOffice competing with MSO. As 
> far as we are concerned, we are now the leading, driving, and bleeding 
> edge of the office suite development. MSO can now try to follow in our 
> footsteps and try to compete with us. We should not be looking at 
> ourselves as anything but this. And, no, I am not talking from the 
> point of view of Base, but from the point of view of the whole 
> LibreOffice project.

There has been at least one article about MS wanting to do a release 
cycle like LO does, every few months for the next version of their 
different software lines.  I think people are getting tired waiting 1 or 
2 years for the next update to MSO and their other products.

Well, LO [and FOSS] has made that "every few months" release plan work.

As I was told, for the USA, MS is too ingrained in our "lives" to ever 
be replaced.  Well That mindset has been changed in Europe. Hopefully it 
will be in the US.

SO, no we are not competing against MSO, per say, but we have a free 
product that will never cost them to buy/rent/etc.  We have the premier 
office suite in the open source community, for those who have decided 
that looking towards open source might be a good idea over the 
proprietary options.  The US government is moving towards open source, 
so one day they will be looking at an open source office package.

WE have a product that works on Windows, Mac and Linux.  There is a 
movement towards an Android version.

No we are not competing with MSO, we have by passed them and went on to 
be the cutting edge office package that introduces new and improved 
option every few months, not every few years.

> Certainly MSO is out there, but we need more of a "forward looking 
> philosophy" rather than a "looking over our shoulder" or "competing 
> with ..." philosophy.
>
> So, as Tim has pointed out, this is not the place to debate the 
> virtues of the Base code. I see on the users' list that some people 
> use Base as it is, and, not as a front-end to any other sql-database. 
> When they have problems, bugs, we, as LibreOffice members need to 
> direct them to the Bugzilla reporting and in time Base will improve. 
> But for now, from what I can see, some are using Base with success and 
> not complaining about it.
>
> So, as you can read from the text in the brochure, the Base section 
> does not mention any "competing with Access" and I would suggest that 
> we NOT say that it competes with Access in any of our brochures.

We need to work on this to have some better text better alluding to MSO 
formats without saying so.

"For moreextended interoperability,LibreOffice supports document formats 
of many other softwaresuites, from the most current to numerous legacy 
formats."


Maybe "most current, and popular, to numerous legacy formats" would work.

I do not want to state MSO file formats, but we do support them to 
various degrees.  Support for MSO 2013 version of OOXML is not all there 
YET, but it will get better over the next few months.  Since '07 and '10 
does not completely support '13 OOXML, we do not need to talk about that 
either in this brochure.

> Cheers,
>
> Marc


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