Simple GNOME marketing

At the Systems fair this year in Munich, Thomas Keup tried to persuade me that we should just be marketing GNOME as beautiful or cool. He’s a marketing expert, but I wasn’t easily persuaded. It seemed too simplistic.

I’ve been on a few stands now for GNOME, and I’ve got pretty good at introducing it to newcomers as easy-to-use, allowing people to enjoy, communicate, and work without confusing distractions. Just getting our people to focus again and again on “easy to use” since Linuxtag was a big step forward, and got clear results. People were very enthusiastic. But still, easy-to-use is a bit conceptual, and it takes a few more seconds to explain what that means, usually with a quick example, like showing an understandable dialog or reminding someone about some ridiculous preference option they’ve seen before. If you are lucky they’ve then got something in their head that they can repeat to their friends, but they probably can’t do that quickly. OK, so it doesn’t help that “leicht-zu-bedienener-desktop” sometimes loses a syllable or two on the way out of my mouth.

So, I revised my marketing spiel. I started greeting people with “Here is GNOME, the beautiful Linux deskop.” Then I’d get into easy-to-use, safe, capable, etc, as secondary stuff. It was even better. Everyone likes something beautiful and you don’t immediately invite them to think of their preconceived ideas of what easy-to-use is (people are confused about that in a variety of ways). And once you’ve hooked them, you get to explain what’s so beautiful, showing them how friendly and easy the desktop is. For a couple of days at Systems, we were giving this sales show to a small crowds. People stuck around to hear it.

So, I’m convinced that our marketing effort should choose one or two simple themes and really push them. Let GNOME be associated with those ideas, and let our fans tell the world about the (wonderful) secondary details. I think this is why Firefox is successful – Firefox is associated with Safe and Tabs.

What theme should we use? Here’s a poll.

7 thoughts on “Simple GNOME marketing

  1. Beauty won me over to GNOME. I used IceWM before, and was quite happy with it, but GNOME desktop screenshots seduced me.

    I think this is the right way to marked GNOME.

  2. Voted for “Friendly”.
    Sure, “leicht-zu-bedienener-desktop” might be a bit of a tongue-twister, why not call it “benutzerfreundlich”?

  3. I think “easy-to-use” is selling it short. Sure it’s easy-to-use, but easy-to-use includes a lot of crap. I think that instead “intuitive” should be the push. Intuitive is a better subset of easy-to-use IMHO, and it’s the important subset. Something can be easy to use because it is simply very limited, or it can be easy to use because it somehow makes complex things seem simple. I believe the latter is a much better goal.

  4. Since people (non-geek people) seems to associate GNU/Linux with difficulty and geeks I think the best way to sell GNOME is the term “Friendly”. Beautifull, easy-to-use, safe etc. are too subjectivs terms. One user can argue than KDE is more beautiful, more easy and so one. And another one could say that Mac Os X got the safer interface.
    But the real point is that GNOME developers (for me as an user) are working to make it more and more “Friendly”.
    And today GNOME *is* friendly.

  5. well, I think Gnome is in the right direction. But as a developer view i’d like a more cohesion in the
    development platform. I feel Gnome is in the search of a language for expand new ideas. Developers builds that people
    use, and by now they (developers) does not have the right tools. (C++ and a better documentation?)
    I think gtkmm is the orphan child and it would be (my point of view) a solution.

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