Re: [Hampshire] I am a person not a PC...

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 09:54:07AM +0000, Alan Pope wrote:
> In the Apple
> ads the actors portray the persona of the computers themselves, not
> the users. They clearly seek to show the PC as stuffy, boring,
> business like, and incapable of anything fun, whereas the Mac is
> young, trendy, flexible, agile and so on.

I don't know. Mac fanbois do contract that thing of thinking PC users
are for dweebs and Macs are made of cool.

> We should be looking at ways of promoting what we have, our advantages
> over the competition, our strengths, not kick off knee-jerk copy-cat
> reactionary marketing. The public see through that very quickly. Take
> the appalling Novel "I'm Linux" adverts as a prime example of how
> _not_ to do it.

But we could advertise the truth: Macs cost a zillion pounds and have the
usability of a hedgehog, Windows costs a ton and has the security of a
lunchbox. Linux costs nothing and is as powerful as a JCB. About as easy
to use too. You have to learn what the levers do, but it's not beyond the
wits of your typical construction worker.

But seriously, I have thought for a while that one group to target would
be SOHO users who are looking for an upgrade from Windows XP or even
2000, and who are horrified by the system requirements and general
direction of Vista. Business users see those platforms as stable and for
the most part unintrusive, but really really clunky. You probably know
people with 20 tray icons just to make the system do everything they
wanted it to do in the first place, or the experience of spending hours
looking for a way to do something seemingly straightforward and either
failing or having to download some nagware or malware (with yet another
tray icon) to make it work.

I really think we could make extremely persuasive arguments that could
be effective at promoting Linux to that group. Trying to lure Mac
fanbois with glossy branding exercises on the other hand is an exercise
doomed to failure.

Dan