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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] A Preliminary Abstraction of the Target Groups Problem
From:       Mihnea Capraru <mihnea_capraru () yahoo ! de>
Date:       2005-11-19 0:48:19
Message-ID: 20051119004819.15364.qmail () web26307 ! mail ! ukl ! yahoo ! com
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It would probably make no sense to target 'everybody',
both because we cannot say something that everybody
likes, and because not everybody's needs and tastes
can be suited in the same way. A much better approach
would be addressing the needs of relatively specific
categories and really make them happy with KDE, since
n loyal users are much more valuable than 4 x n users
who might as well choose the next alternative when the
slightest factor moves them towards them.

I suspect that I've said nothing new with this, sorry
for repeating obvious things, they are meant as a
background.

Now for the foreground. Let's ignore the specific and
difficult question 'who are the target groups' for a
moment, and focus on their abstract structure. This
should tell us how many concurrent strategies we
actually need, and how they interrelate.

I can see two ways of using KDE, and two reasons for
using it. (Actually they are broad categories and
admit of much finer nuances, this is a bird's eye
view)

From the standpoint of usage, we can distinguish among

A. users proper (end users), and
B. developers (mostly but not only coders)

From the standpoint of usage incentives, we can
distinguish

I. loyal users, the ones who use KDE because they
choose to, and
II. collateral users, the ones who use it because they
are not in charge.

People either use software at home, or they use it at
work/school.

They use what they choose at home, but they don't
choose what to use at work/school.

The same is not so true for developers, who naturally
have a mighty word to say when it comes to what kind
of tools they use. Developers too use what they choose
at home, either for development or towards other
goals. But they often use what they want at work too
(not at school, though, where tools/languages/APIs are
usually imposed).


The cartesian product of our two predicates yields
four classes, which themselves admit subclasses:



AI: voluntary home users

There are two kinds of AI:

AIa: voluntary home users who know that they use KDE
and have an at least slight preference for it.

-------

AIb: home users who only use Linux (mostly, but also
some other OSes) on purpose, KDE being either the
accepted default of their distros, or treated as the
'least evil'


-------------------

AII: work/school users

Some work/school users also use KDE at home. I'll
include these in category AI. This can either mean AIa
or AIb.

After moving these ones to category AI, we still have
two kinds of AII:

AIIa: people who don't use KDE at home, but don't mind
to use it at work/school.

-------

AIIb: people who are forced to use it, but actually
hate it. (There are some of these too, I suspect)

-------------------

BI: committed developers

These are the guys who not only implement KDE apps,
but also enjoy doing it. They can be split into two
categories:

BIa: contributors, who give something back directly to
the community. This can either be the KDE project
itself, or related projects like Extragear members,
Kolab, FreeNX, Klik, community driven KDE-centric
distros etc.

-------

BIb: committed developers with no direct
contributions. (They like the APIs, components etc,
but they don't donate code or anything else to the
community)

-------------------

BII: work/school developers

Some work/school developers also code against KDE at
home. I'll include these in category BI. This can
either mean BIa or BIb.

BIIa0, BIIa1, BIIb0 and BIIb1 are defined as follows:

the meaning of a and b is the same as in AIIa and
AIIb.

0 and 1 indicate whether these developers' activity at
work/school contributes to KDE or not. 0 stands for
developers who use KDE as a tool to write third-party
apps against, 1 is for the guys hired by their
employers or instructed by their universities to
contribute to KDE.

-------------------


All of this says nothing about whom we want to target,
but whoever those guys are, they fit somewhere into
one of these categories. More detail can be provided,
and as the quantity of detailincreasess, it makes less
and less sense to keep this arborescent gender/species
structure and more sense to move to something more
generic. But this is just a simple abstraction.

Now I'll try to sketch some general, but seemingly (to
me) important strategic principles.




1. We don't target people who have already made up
their mind against KDE. It is next to impossible to
determine somebody to change his mind.


1.1 We don't waste time trying to get the news about
Qt going GPL to random idiots maintaining the 'KDE is
not GPL'. (Seen at various places, always refrained
from commenting on it for lack of belief in the
curability of stupidity).

1.1.1 We do, however, make the 'KDE Myths' page a more
prominent presence on KDE.org, and give it a catchy
name as for instance KDE Mythbuster (not original,
should find something else). We keep the content but
change the text to make the issues sound funny (they
even are, from a certain perspective). Being funny is
very important when rejecting false accusations,
otherwise people tend to disbelieve.


1.2 We don't waste time trying to persuade space
maniacs that KDE is not 'bloated'. Certain people have
suffered deep traumas when hard disks where extremely
small by today's standards, and now they exhibit
obsessive-compulsive behaviour (I know somebody who
owns a 40 GB HDD, yet sometimes deletes all kinds of
small files, wondering whether something still needs
them). The fact that KDE the desktop comes bundled
with applications is a sin, in their eyes. It's like
trying to pervert their hard drives - let alone the
fact that kicker has applets which 'run in the
background and take up all the memory'. We cannot deal
with this kind of paranoia.

1.2.1 We do, however, stress the fact that KDE is
quite lean and fast for what it does. This would be
best accomplished by a 'minimum system requirements'
page somewhere at areachablee point of KDE.org.


1.3 We don't waste time trying to explain the
advantages of OOP over procedural programming for
developing complex systems. The only ones who need
this explanation are either bad programmers, or
programmers who are extremely good speakers of their
procedural languages/idioms. For quite obvious reasons
it makes no sense to persuade any of them.


Note: 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 both serve the purpose of
educating people who have heard rumours, but don't
know yet what to believe. These ones can still be
saved :)




2. We somehow target people who hate KDE.

2.1 The problem with them is that they do their best
to worsen KDE's image.

2.1.1 To make them stop this, we should recommend two
practices to the community's members.

2.1.1.1 Never personally call them trolls, morons,
idiots, stupid, braindead or other nasty words (even
if they seem to be so). This turns them into direct
and embittered enemies, and most of them never shut up
again.

2.1.1.2 Some of them are neither of the above, they
are rathermisinformedd (and willing to relay without
checking the facts). It makes sense to be friendly to
these ones and politely point them to the page
temporarily named 'Mythbuster'. They will probably not
switch over to KDE overnight, but at least they would
consider it a 'nice guy' and stop attacking it (much
like KDE advocates seldom attack Ubuntu, although it
doesn't help KDE too much).

2.1.1.2.1 The point is still not to try to turn them
into users. Never tell them something like 'KDE is
better than your favorite whatever'. They don't
believe this, so why would they believe that we are
actually nice?





3. We need a strategy for people who use KDE and like
it.

3.1 These ones need special care, because they are
extremely valuable.

3.1.1 Part of their value consists in their
willingness to rather report bugs than swear and
switch to something else. They are extremely stable,
let's call them 'bug-free users'.

3.1.2 The other part of their value comes from their
readyness to promote KDE. This is likely the most
effective method of promotion, and it needs its own
methods, which aren't covered by this document (mostly
because I don't know what to say :) , but also because
it's supposed to be abstract)

3.2 What does this special care consist in? This is a
question to be answered.





4. A strategy for people who use Linux, don't use KDE,
but have nothing against it.

4.1 Part of this strategy is generic. We need to tell
them what we tell non-linux users too - about
integration (which should be renamed to 'inner beauty'
or something better), about 'outer beauty' (good
looks, very very important for adopters), about
freedom. Maybe these can be the 'three messages', by
the way? 'Inner Beauty', 'Outer Beauty', 'Freedom'.
These might be the labels of the first three
paragraphs of the 'More..' page on KDE.org

4.2 Part of this strategy is non-generic. This part
concerns people who not only have nothing against KDE,
but also have never seen it. There are lots of Ubuntu
or Fedora (maybe Solaris too?) newbies that fit into
this category. These ones can be reached through
specialized channels. It doesn't make sense to flood
distro-specific forums with 'please drop xyz and
replace with KDE' posts, but it does make sense to
write very good and easy to follow tutorials on how to
install KDE - and post them to those user communities.
Whoever has already come to Linux is curious to find
out more, which means that some will install, and part
of these will like it.





5. A strategy for non-UNIX people.

5.1 As I've already written in another post, the fact
that we depend on X11 is a major show-stopper. It's
very important to make these people decide to try it
out.

5.1.1 In order to accomplish this, we need to achieve
the 'A Brand New World' effect. They are probably
looking for new software to try out, otherwise they
don't hear about KDE. So why not benefit from their
desires and suggest that they try another operating
system for new software?

5.1.1.1 We must achieve the 'A Brand New World' effect
by underlining the virtues of KDE. Linux is just
something they need in order to run KDE, it's an easy
to handle dependency - this must be the message. KDE
currently generates a lot less loyalty than Linux or
Firefox or OpenOffice or possibly even Gaim, and this
is very, very bad for KDE (of course, I don't suggest
renaming the OS to KDE/Linux :) )

5.2 Other than this, the message to non-UNIX people is
probably the same as 4.1.



6. A strategy for the enterprise

6.1 A big part of this has to do with enterprise
specific features. The devels can probably tell us
more on this topic.

6.2 Cost-effectiveness needs to be stressed. Just
don't tell them that it's free of charge and that's
all. Ideally we should provide good estimations of
what it costs to migrate to KDE under different
scenarios.

6.2.1 Who can do this and how?

6.3 Very important. Not even business people are
perfectly rational beings ;) This means that their
decisions are not only determined by value vs. cost.
Especially the value tends to equal whatever the
decision maker wants to substitute for the term
'value'. This means that it might turn out that the
best way to reach the enterprise is through bug-free
users, especially IT department members. Executives
are also very important, but it's much easier to get
to the IT guys first.



7. A strategy for schools/universities.

7.1 It's quite clear that KDE usage in schools is
probably only superseded in importance by usage by
bug-free users.

7.2 Enterprise specific features are less important
here. But KDE Edu is very important.

7.2.1 KDE Edu only covers a small part of what
teachers might use, but we can use it to greatly
improve image. Articles about KStars or Kalzium or
other impressive apps should be posted to education
specific media.

7.2.2 In its current stage, KDE Edu can be used for
improving image, but expecting schools to adopt KDE
only because of it would probably not be wise.

7.3 Stress freedom. This sector is rich in
open-minded, enlightened decision makers. Freedom +
KDE Edu better than all other free alternatives might
provide the magic combination.

7.4 Stress cost effectiveness, this is important for
schools.


8. A strategy for public administration

8.1 Do we need this? Maybe it goes together with
enterprise, with less stress on features, more on cost
and much more on source code access.

8.2 Out of the three elements at 8.1, only features
really distinguish KDE. Which does not mean that 'the
more, the better'. Maybe we can make user-friendliness
look like a feature and call it something else.


NOTE: 6.3 applies to schools. Don't know about
administration, since they have strict buying rules
and regulations.


9 A strategy for coders

9.1 This involves a lot of collaboration with the
devels.

9.1.1 We need to provide exciting articles and
tutorials about coding with KDE.

9.1.2 Good API docs. Important for everybody, but
extremely important for the non-contributing
developers.

9.1.3 A very good KDE4 book? Would it make sense to
ask the developers about this? I don't see any reason
why an editor wouldn't want such a book.

9.2 All points above actually concern the quality of
the product too, not just promotion. But when it comes
to developers, raw quality matters only too much. The
bottom line from a promotional point of view is that
learning to code KDE should be fun and rewarding, not
a constant overwhelming of obstacles like 'what is
that method supposed to do, how do i find out etc'

9.3 Alternative languages require lots of attention.
Supported and well documented Java bindings could
attract an awful lot of developers, for instance.




Summing up, there is probably need of the following
strategies:

- for developers

- for businesses, schools and administration (this has
its minor variants)

- for prospective users (minor variants for people who
do/don't already use linux)

- for noncommittedd users have I actually tackled
this? I think not. maybe they are actually a
subcategory of the above)

- for bug-free users

- for people who will likely never be users, to
minimize bad advertising and avoid FUD



This is a long document, it's certainly not very
creative and it doesn't say anything specifically
about who the target groups actually are (I hope,
since that's the purpose). But I hope it at least
analyses the big problem into smaller bits, which are
more or less independent of each other and thus easier
to solve.



Mihnea



	
		
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