Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Comments to Proposals

Hi Italo,

On 09/11/2020 23.52, Italo Vignoli wrote:
> First of all, thanks for the proposals, although most of them are still
> focusing on community members and not on end users. Sorry, but the label
> must not please community members but educate - or help to educate - the
> enterprises who are ignoring the concept of giving back to open source
> projects in order to make the projects self-sustainable (in a way or
> another, where the another is a plethora of forks backed each one by one
> company, which is exactly the model we decided not to implement when we
> launched LibreOffice). So, this is not a self-reassurance exercise for
> community members, but a product positioning effort.
>
> So, the proposals which can be included in the list are Sophie's
> "CREATIVE" and Marco's "STANDARD" and "DESKTOP", as they provide several
> options in term of communications. All other proposals cannot be used as
> a basis for educating enterprises by exerting some moral suasion, as the
> concept cannot be associated to the label.

after thinking about the whole topic once again, I have to say that I
wouldn't personally consider the approach to "exert some moral suasion"
by putting a label that is more or less supposed to say "Either buy a
LibreOffice Enterprise edition from an ecosystem company or don't use
LibreOffice at all in your organization" an approach that I'd be happy with.

In my opinion, the "Home Edition" label would pretty much have the same
misleading connotation as a "Personal Edition" label, which Regina's
email [7] describes well.

My main points are basically (partly already mentioned in my previous
emails to tdf-board-discuss [1][2][3][4][5], which probably don't count
anymore since the discussion was restarted here on the marketing list):

1) I believe it has the potential to decrease the use of LibreOffice
(from TDF as well as from ecosystem companies) in total, since
organizations that are discouraged to start/continue using LibreOffice
from TDF don't necessarily switch to LibreOffice Enterprise, but might
as well choose other alternatives, (e.g. OpenOffice, which still seems
to have a stronger brand than LibreOffice anyway).
I think that a more wide-spread use of LibreOffice (in whatever edition)
will in the end also result in more companies looking for (and being
willing to pay for) professional support of some kind. And IMHO, many
companies have needs for professional support besides the fact that
there is no "annoying label".
I personally think this would be the more sustainable approach at least
in the long run.

2) In my opinion, it has the potential to discourage several kinds of
contributions to LibreOffice by more or less advertising buying a
licensed enterprise version as the "only valid way" to use LibreOffice
inside an organization. While I believe that this may be the right
approach for many organizations, it excludes other kinds of
contributions that we should IMHO encourage, like e.g.:

* contribute to development oneself and profit from the improvements
with the next TDF version (without having to build a completely own
"edition" of LibreOffice that doesn't have the unwanted tagging)

* pay an ecosystem company for fixing bugs or adding features that will
be available in the next TDF version

* donate to TDF (and thus make it possible for TDF to fund tenders which
can in turn create revenue for ecosystem companies as well; assuming
that existing issues in the tendering process can be mitigated...)

While Michael gives good reasons in [6] why "many consultancies desire a
product based business, where a product is sold and paid for in advance"
and I think that's fair and an approach that should work well, I still
think that the other options still shouldn't be somewhat (explicitly or
implicitly) "discouraged".


Given that, and that "No label is not an option" (which would have been
the preferred option otherwise), I'd still be for something rather
neutral like "TDF Edition" (which still gives a hint that there are
other editions available as well, in particular when mentioned
explicitly at an appropriate place), but could live with "Standard
Edition", too (or another similar label, but "Basic" doesn't sound good
to me).

Michael


[1]
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04440.html
[2]
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04495.html
[3]
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04497.html
[4]
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04498.html
[5]
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04502.html
[6] https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html
[7]
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04353.html

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