Re: [libreoffice-marketing] MARKETING PLAN: Some Proposals

On 09.11.2020 16:04, Italo Vignoli wrote:

Hello Italo and Community,
thanks for your inputs here.

Initially I was not in favour of a label at all and you all know, 
resistance to change is an uneasy beast to deal with. ;)
Thinking better to this proposed change I need to admit that indeed, a 
label, a tag was something needed directly several years ago. I'm not 
talking only about the need to educate the big enterprise to contribute 
back to the project, I think that a label could be in general the way to 
also clarify who is releasing what. This need is much more evident when 
interacting with people outside our community.
In the past we already used some tags unofficially for specifying what 
the final user was installing.
Try for example to think at the time we used "LibreOffice Vanilla" for 
addressing the version from TDF and distinguish it from the releases 
done by the different Linux distributions with their repackaging and 
small changes to the default enabled features.
Yes, we already had "Vanilla", "from the Linux distributions", "from 
TDF", "stable", "unstable", "still", "fresh", "LTS", "enterprise", 
"business version", "supported version" and probably this unofficial 
list is even longer than this. :)
In general I think that an official label could also finally address 
this need to identify when the product comes from TDF and when from 
other places and should avoid to outlaw the companies/public 
administrations that are not buying a supported version and are instead 
directly investing in development with own developers or having a 
contract with one of the ecosystem members for founding the development.
I know this is a slightly different point of view and I still think that 
"origin and target" should be addressed together by this new label/tag 
added to the main LibreOffice brand.
Target and origin matched together in a tag/label should also clarify 
the final user expectations. When I was a board member I was reading the 
emails we got to the TDF info address and you can't really imagine how 
many people are writing to that address considering it like the support 
address to be contacted in case of issues with a purchased software. 
Some of these support requests were really rude. :(

> 1. Product Label for the community supported version provided by TDF

COMMUNITY: I like it and this was my instinctive initial idea. After 
some researches I understood what Italo told about the "open core" 
meaning of this tag. As much as I like this proposal, I think our 
business model is not the open core one and always with the 
target-origin approach in mind my fear is that this could be misleading. 
Our community is made of volunteers, ecosystem and investors/donors and 
this tag is not a way to differentiate what the version provided by TDF 
with volunteers support is in the reality.

PERSONAL: always with this target-origin approach, I'm missing the 
origin here. Which tag should be used for example by the Limux project 
or by SUSE or by all the others that are investing in our project with a 
contract with one of the ecosystem companies for fixing specific issues 
without using their LTS branded version? Why we should ask to these 
contributors to use a personal tag giving the wrong impression to their 
users that the software is for "for personal use only" and they are the 
"bad folks" not contributing to our open source project in the proper 
way?

ROLLING/TUMBLEWEED: I can be biased here as openSUSE community member 
but "rolling" is not only something unstable. ;)
Look for example at openSUSE Tumbleweed. The distro is a rolling one, in 
constant evolution, it's true, you can get all the updated software 
available from upstream projects and the distro has in any case a really 
extensive quality work done by SUSE, its partners and by the openSUSE 
community. At the end, this tumbleweed concept is not like using a 
master version of LibreOffice but is closer to chose fresh instead of 
still. ;)
The concept of rolling is something that I really like. it's a shared 
effort from all the contributors (volunteers, ecosystem and investors) 
to deliver something that works as expected without providing a long 
term support version. With this rolling concept I can't see a negative 
outcome also for public administrations like Munich or companies like 
SUSE supporting our project in a different way. I like "tumbleweed" more 
than rolling to be honest but if this concept will be selected we can 
try to find a more effective and visual word too.

CLASSIC: can be an idea too but for my taste, classic looks also like 
something old, aged and I can see it more close to the distinction we 
have for LibreOffice still and LibreOffice fresh instead of a way to 
differentiate who is doing what and how.

BASIC: with "basic" I can see the same issues already mentioned with 
"PERSONAL" plus the negative connotation that the basic version has less 
features or it has something less if compared with the supported 
version. The difference I see here is much more than the lack of 
professional support.

CREATIVE: I feel this proposal closer to what I wrote for 
ROLLING/TUMBLEWEED and indeed, I like it. :)

> 2. Where to position the label: title bar, about box, start center

On this I would prefer to leave the decision to Marketing and Design 
team.
What I can say is that the start center is not really a visible place. 
You can see the logo and the new tag/label there only if you really have 
a fresh user profile, otherwise that area will directly show the recent 
document list/thumbnails.
I would prefer to see the tag in the about box also with a link (like 
for the credit) to a page explaining what the tag means and why it is 
there.
On the title bar I could see both the chosen tag or a "LibreOffice 
technology".


Sorry for the long e-mail ;)
Yours,
Marina

--
Marina Latini
IRC: deneb_alpha on Freenode

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