Ubuntu TV Commercials.

[rucadulu]

If Ubuntu started a donation pool to purchase TV commercial time to promote Ubuntu, would you donate?

[aysiu]

If the commercial was for the HP Mini Mie or the Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu, then I would donate (oh, and if the commercial were well-produced).

If the commmercial was for Ubuntu in general, then I would not donate to it. I don't believe in advertising an OS by itself. The best way for people to experience Ubuntu is preinstalled, the same way they experience Windows and Mac OS X. If they have to install and configure Ubuntu themselves, they're far more likely to have a bad experience.

[rucadulu]

I like the pre-installed idea. This way Ubuntu could also ask for matching funds from the manufacture of the hardware.

[Gizenshya]

Advertising just doesn't apply to certain things, including Ubuntu. The reasons are complicated, but there would be nothing to gain, and lots of donations to lose. Viral marketing is the only valid solution to spread brand awareness, loyalty, recall, change brand image, or whatever your goal(s) would be with your marketing mix and media plan.

Have you seen the rate cards as of late? good luck!

On a completely unrelated note, I just noticed something.

Type Microsoft. ok, nothing special, right?

Now type Ubuntu. Notice anything funny?

Both proper nouns... but yet my computer (running Ubuntu) recognizes the proper noun Microsoft, but not its own name. Anyone else find that odd?

[TheIdiotThatIsMe]

I agree with the idea that I'd rather see a commercial with Ubuntu preinstalled on a computer as an experience, rather than as an OS.

However, when it comes to Canonical / Ubuntu, I would donate to projects that encouraged growth of the Linux as an ecosystem and a platform; for example, towards tools that allowed easier and more coordinated development. People make fun of Ballmer for his developers, developers, developers escapade, but in reality, he was dead on. A platform needs developers. Only after developers do you attract users.

Honestly, if I was to donate to anything Linux related it'd probably be to the Linux Foundation, as I personally think they have good intentions and ideas for improving Linux as a whole (LSB and recent integration of openSuse Build Service to allow easy porting of LSB-compliant programs across many distributions; great for ISV's).

[billgoldberg]

No, because I'm 100% sure that Ubuntu will never run that commercial in Belgium and I don't like commercials.

[Eisenwinter]

I would donate to an open source project if I had an internationally valid account, but not to fund a TV commercial.

Unfortunately, I can't sign up to paypal correctly, because my card is only valid in Israel.

heh, it's kind of a bummer, I'd buy thinkgeek merchandise if I could.

[rucadulu]

Advertising just doesn't apply to certain things, including Ubuntu. The reasons are complicated, but there would be nothing to gain, and lots of donations to lose. Viral marketing is the only valid solution to spread brand awareness, loyalty, recall, change brand image, or whatever your goal(s) would be with your marketing mix and media plan.

I would love to know what you think is so complicated about advertising a quality product in order to gain market share. Linux will never gain wide spread use as long as it is only word of mouth advertising. It has been 16years since the first Linux kernel. Look how well Microsoft did in 16 years using advertising to gain market share. If Linux is every to become more than a server OS and a desktop OS for techno-geeks, distro's (like Ubuntu) need to pull there head's out for the sand and stand up and fight fire with fire. And the only to do that in the marketing game is to advertise.

I am huge fan of open source products I use them at work and at home, but I am sickend by the approuch the open sourc communuity seems to have taken of not going after there slice of mass market. Open source products like Ubuntu and Openoffice could grap a huge chunk of market share. But that will not happen until the community starts to advertise there products. Really just look at the stats and see where it has gotten us, 16+ years of opensource development and less than 5% of total market share that is pathtic.

[Cybie257]

The reason Linux has so little market-share isn't due to the fact of not being advertised. It's due to the fact that there are so many distributions and very little standardization. Ubuntu has done a great job making things work. But, Ubuntu alone will not make Linux a mainstream OS.

Now, correct me if I am wrong. I'm going by memory based on the following..

As far as I know, your major distros (Debian and Redhat) IE: .deb and .rpm... have different file structures designed into the OS. Within a reply from the Adobe forums, the reason Adobe has not provided a Create Suite for Linux isn't due to demand, but rather the lack of Standards within Linux file structures and other areas. We all like the idea of choice, but there has to be standards at the same time. Without that, Linux will not go anywhere like Windows has in the past. No OS will ever take off with only Open Source Software options.

In order for Linux to take off and become a major player and become something businesses will begin to implement Linux Desktops in place of Windows Desktops, is when the commercial software industry begins producing software for Linux. Again, that won't happen (like it should be) due to the fact of no standards. It comes down to the fact that if you can't install something from one Linux Distro onto another without going through hoops (DEB vs RPM), then the incentive to produce commercial software will never reach a point where Linux becomes a true viable option for Businesses and Home users alike. For example... How many posts have you seen where a user says something like this: "I switched from XXXX Distro (KDE) and now I'm using Ubuntu (or other) with Gnome. I use to use XXXX package but it's not available fo Ubuntu or Gnome. Is there an Alternative?" I've seen that to many times and that spells it out right there. No standards, no cross-distro/GUI standards, things will just remain as they are.

How can this be resolved? Cooperation between the major players in Linux. They need to quit competing against each other as much as they do and begin working together and creating cross-distro solutions and standards. How they can do that is unknown as I am not a developer for either side and don't know what all it would take in order to create standards across the board without breaking their own distros created throughout the past 10-16 years. though I hope someday to begin developing software (taking C++ classes now) for Linux. I shouldn't have to decide which Linux Platform, or GUI, to develop for as I would prefer to just develop for "Linux Users" in general. Things should be the same across the board for software installation.

Another thing that hinders the development of commercial software is not only what I said above about distros, but about the different desktops. KDE vs Gnome vs the others. Why so many different desktops that require so much difference in the way things are coded? Doesn't make much sense and creates another level of "Which Desktop (GUI) should this software be designed for?" Sure, it would be great if commercial software developers would create everything for Ubuntu Gnome (my fav), but maybe others like the KDE version of RedHat.



So, to answer the question "Would I donate...", not until standards are created to making things easier for developers to create software packages that the mainstream industry uses. Adobe Creative Suite is here to stay. Too many graphics companies use it and will not stray from it as the file types are standard throughout. IE: Illustrator Files. Inkscape is a great Open Source alternative for a small percentage of users. But for companies that exchange graphic images, you will never see Inkscape become a major player, nor anything that the general commercial public will use. Adobe is not going to allow the .ai format to be opened up. This is one of the major reasons the MAC grabbed a larger market thanks to Windows Vista. The necessary software was out there, including, but not limited to MS Office.


I'm a very heavy supporter of Linux, so don't think any of my opinions above are in any negative form about using it. I use it 90% at home, an unfortunately only about 10% at work. The 10% is due only to the fact that I talked the company in to letting me create 2 servers with Linux, which I use Ubuntu!! :)

-Cybie

PS. Just to clarify. Yes, I know that you "can" get things to work cross-distro and cross-GUI. But it needs to be as simple as clicking "Install" and not require anyone to go into the command-line interface. 95% of he people have no desire, nor the ability to understand what to do. These days, mainstream users want point and click. If they have to use the keyboard and special commands to install/convert/compile, etc. in order to get a piece of software working, they aren't going to do it and will never make the full transition to Linux. In fact, many of them will run the opposite direction and never touch Linux again if that's what they are faced with.

[rucadulu]

Very well written and to the point. You have convinced me that while it is unfortunate I will most likely never see Linux as main stream desktop system. Base on the points you made I doubt it will ever even reach the current market share that OS x now enjoys. :(

My life is I might as well conform and go back to using only Windows. (Just kidding.)

[James_Lochhead]

Na, I don't think Ubuntu should be having that kind of publicity yet. A lot of people will only try things once or twice, Ubuntu is not ready for the main stream yet, it needs more development (in terms of applications). If lots of people tried it in its current state we would lose a lot of users in the long run.

Give Linux 5 years. :P