Advertising?

[Ride Jib]

I know there has been talk about a Ubuntu commercial. I was just curious what other attempts are being made to advertise Ubuntu to the general public?

I have been using Linux for about 5 years now, and I wouldn't have even heard of Ubuntu if someone at my local LUG didn't stress to me how awesome it was. Now that I have used it, and see that it is the best distro I have used (and I have tried over 10 flavors) and try to tell as many people as I can about it. I've gotten 3 people to convert (1 from Windows, and 2 from other distros).


Edit: Also.. I am aware of the spreadubuntu site, but I'm thinking more in terms of "in your face" advertising.

Anyway, just some food for thought.

[somuchfortheafter]

i wanted popup adds ........ /sarcasm

[royg1234]

like a TV commercial? lol. I'd throw some money in for a Superbowl commercial. When's the next time a Superbowl and a major release coincide? (or World Cup, if the ratings are comparable).

or how about MTV ads? or put Ubuntu into rap videos the way iPod did? or in a summer blockbuster? Times Square?

[UbuWu]

like a TV commercial? lol. I'd throw some money in for a Superbowl commercial. When's the next time a Superbowl and a major release coincide? (or World Cup, if the ratings are comparable).

or how about MTV ads? or put Ubuntu into rap videos the way iPod did? or in a summer blockbuster? Times Square?

Mark Shuttleworth probably has enough money to do it all.... So who knows... Or maybe a plane can drop thousands of cd's all over New York.... :razz:

[polo_step]

Competent broadcast advertising is incredibly expensive at every single turn. It's just mind boggling.

What I don't get is why anyone would spend real money to promote a free product, unless there was some heat up his sleeve for later exploitation of his userbase or market presence (pick your favorite example here).

"The distro's free, but the T-shirts are $19.99..."

Makes no sense to me, though Linux seems to operate in its own strange world. School me if you can.

Ubuntu seems to be on its way to being a meme-of-the-moment (how I got here, BTW), which should be advertising enough, considering how many corporate marketers enviously aspire to it.

[royg1234]

Competent broadcast advertising is incredibly expensive at every single turn. It's just mind boggling.

What I don't get is why anyone would spend real money to promote a free product, unless there was some heat up his sleeve for later exploitation of his userbase or market presence (pick your favorite example here).

"The distro's free, but the T-shirts are $19.99..."

Makes no sense to me, though Linux seems to operate in its own strange world. School me if you can.

Ubuntu seems to be on its way to being a meme-of-the-moment (how I got here, BTW), which should be advertising enough, considering how many corporate marketers enviously aspire to it.

So do you feel that Firefox and everyone involved is up to no good?

[polo_step]

So do you feel that Firefox and everyone involved is up to no good?That's a unique and interesting case. The Mozilla Foundation is just a damage control creation of AOLTIMEWARNER gracefully (?) ending the disastrous chain of events started by their lunatic purchase of Netscape.

I believe Mozilla's funding from AOL ends in a few weeks, though. Should prove interesting, as they intend to be profitable by selling corporate support for their free suite of programs, as I understand the plan.

"Up to no good" is not my choice of words. I simply point out that when large amounts of money are involved, there must be a compelling motive, though having seen the HiTech and DotCom bubbles up close, I would hasten to point out that the business plans don't have to make the slightest bit of sense. ;-)

[royg1234]

I believe Mozilla's funding from AOL ends in a few weeks, though. Should prove interesting, as they intend to be profitable by selling corporate support for their free suite of programs, as I understand the plan.


This idea seems wacky to me. If the products are so good, there should be no need for support. Rational choice theory says that eventually the Mozilla people will eventually be tempted to make bad product. Why not just straight up charge for corporate use of the products?

Or what if a bunch of companies got together and joined a club where each one agrees to send full-time people and money to some kind of central lab? The money that would normally go into a third party's pockets could go straight into improving software. And even if this club's software becomes a monopoly, none of the usual badness of monopolies applies here, since nobody is hoarding profits, because the only value added in this kind of enterprise is final product--good software.

If proprietary development is seen as a chain--programmers > software companies and their owners > end customers--then the above model seems to cut off the middleman. This is good, right?

And if governments joined this club in representing the general public (of course, this should only be done for things that everyone will use, like an OS)? That sounds scary to USA ears, though.

This is all layman's rambling, btw.

[polo_step]

This idea seems wacky to me. If the products are so good, there should be no need for support.
Note that this model is what Linspire is trying on.

They give away their extremely stripped-down Debian OS for OEM installation in all sorts of bargain computer systems at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Fry's, etc., etc. and then try to get the user to pay them a non-optional yearly subscription fee to use their proprietary apt-get front end (CNR) to their closed repositories in order to make a functioning system and to give token customer support.

If you don't pay them the money, they don't want you using their distro, and they're up-front about it, apparently in total ignorance of the network effect in marketing. As I've said before, I wish them all the success they deserve. ;-) I blew off their system on this box and wound up with Ubuntu because it worked.


Rational choice theory says that eventually the Mozilla people will eventually be tempted to make bad product.
Or at least increase its obscurity and complexity, though corporate use tends to generate sufficient customer support traffic to absorb any amount of resources. The "Maytag repairman" image doesn't happen in the spoftware biz (and now I see Maytag is planning to sell out to the Chinese anyway). Jesse White (http://www.tvacres.com/images/maytag_repairman1.jpg) is dead and gone. :)

Why not just straight up charge for corporate use of the products?
That model doesn't seem to work that well in actual practice, but having seen the most utterly insane fantasies palmed off as legitimate business plans during the HiTech & DotCom bubbles, it's certainly far from the worst I've heard. Some major companies never made any sense -- or profit -- but nobody seemed to care. I'll never forget Cory Hamasaki's '90s observation about the lionized CEO of Netscape: "The guy's lost $580,000,000 and he's treated like a rock star." :-P Certainly, that typifies the whole mentality of the time, especially when one remembers that AOL actually bought that money furnace!. Now, years later, we see where that wound up, as a badly bleeding AOL reaches its final cutoff date for support to the Mozilla Foundation, originally a place to put downsized Netscape employees.

All this tends to explain my aporetic response to the excitement surrounding "marketing" free products. Ubuntu's is Shuttleworth's pet for now, and any sugar daddy can pay the rent as well as the next. Ubuntu's totally dependent on his largesse, and we can hope that it will go on for a while before he becomes bored with it and moves on to a new toy.

In the meantime, I suggest the money's better spent on development than frivolous marketing; a truly functional Linux (a goal Ubuntu currently only approaches) will "sell" itself, believe me.