[libreoffice-marketing] Reflections On Today's Meeting

Hi Italo

Thanks for organising this evening's meeting. It was good to put faces to some of the names I see 
on the mailing list. I hope these will become regular events. Some very good points were raised...

DONATIONS

I was interested in Mike Saunders' point that a lot of donations are raised from the download page 
on the website. This suggests to me that these donations are from individuals installing the 
software for their own use - whether that be personal or related to their work or business.

Where LibreOffice is being rolled out across an organisation, it is likely that it is only 
downloaded once with the installation files then being re-used or copied multiple times. The 
message on the website proposing a donation will hardly be seen by anybody in that organisation. 
There was a suggestion to display a dialog on first use in which the case for making a donation 
could be made. I would support this. It means that every user would see it. Of course in an 
organisation it is unlikely that many users would make a donation themselves, but there would at 
least be the chance that the question is raised by some more technically aware users.

MARKETING

Over the last 4 or 5 years, Mike has sent me 3 batches of flyers and other promotional material for 
me to distribute. I have indeed left copies, with permission, in business parks, high schools, the 
local university campus, libraries, the town hall and various other places with a large potential 
audience. There is no way of knowing whether my efforts have resulted in a large numbers of new 
users at least trying LO, or whether it has been a complete waste of time.

If we were to have a "first use" dialog, prompting for donations, then we could also ask the user 
about the source of their decision to install LO e.g flyers, magazine or website article, 
recommendation from a friend or colleague, organisational policy, etc, etc.

USER INTERFACE

Most fashions are cyclic. Nobody ever complained about the Word 97 UI being "old fashioned". Its 
hierarchical menu system was both logical and intuitive. It has often been said that Microsoft only 
introduced the ribbon menu system in order to create something radically different to what had gone 
before - not because it is inherently better or easier to use (which I don't believe it is). It is 
surely significant that few applications other than office suites have gone down this route. We are 
lucky that LO enables switching between a "ribbon" interface and "classic" interface.  It is 
entirely possible that at some point we may see a gradual transition back towards a hierarchical 
menu system in Office 365, even if it manifests itself somewhat differently. For that reason I 
would caution against abandoning the classic menu option for the sake of "modernity".

OPPORTUNITIES

Sully made a very interesting point which confirmed something I had long believed to be true. 
Administrative accountability in the USA extends to a far lower level than in most of Europe. As a 
result the rejection of a particular product or policy in one city does not necessarily tie the 
hands of administrations in neighbouring cities. Compare that against most European countries where 
a decision at the top level has enormous influence over all subordinate levels. As a consequence 
there must be vastly more scope for the adoption of LO in parts of the public sector in the USA 
than elsewhere. While that creates great opportunities, it also presents a great challenge in terms 
of documenting current policies and presenting LO to public authorities across the entire country.

Of course a decision and the implementation of that decision can be very different things. The UK 
government decided in 2014 that open document formats would become the new public sector standard.  
Almost a decade later, working at times closely with government agencies, I have yet to see or 
receive one single document in an open format. I've little doubt that such a rate of change is not 
uncommon elsewhere. We need to be aware that a top level decision to standardise on LibreOffice in 
government use could similarly take years to come to fruition - and that is without the intense 
lobbying by the likes of Microsoft to reverse the policy, such as happened in the Munich city 
administration some years ago.

All the best

Nige

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