Just Uber

Recently I’ve been involving myself with the task of marketing Ubuntu, which lead me to wonder why it is that Ubuntu isn’t marketed very well in the first place.

To understand the question I guess it’d be pertinent to look an operating system oriented company which markets itself quite well. Lets not beat about the bush, lets choose Microsoft.

Here we have an company who have decided that in their latest operating system (Vista) that they are going to police what you do with the digital content that you play on your computer. A company who have created an OS which makes hardware you bought a couple of years ago useless, yet here is a company which is still managing to sell retail copies of Vista in shops. Why?

In addition to the obvious (current market saturation), Microsoft is pretty good at marketing itself and its products. The obvious pre-requisite for good marketing is good marketing people, who are in turn motivated by…. you guessed it ….money!

I think that’s a big problem with marketing Ubuntu. The grassroots advocates of Ubuntu are often techies. They’re honest, down to earth, helpful techies. What we need is double glazing salesmen.

Imagine the scene. You walk into a large marketing and PR company with a large wad of money and announce “I have unlimited capital to spend on this project, I want you to market some software for me”.

“Of course sir” replies the marketer, “and how much may I ask does this software cost”

“This software,” you retort “is free, and not only is it free, but it’s generally more secure, more stable and more responsive than the other types of software it competes against.”

If the marketer hasn’t passed out through sheer pleasure yet, you can bet your bottom dollar that he’s rubbing his hands in glee in the anticipation of an easy and profitable project.

That, to those who explain that we should market our flaws as well as our strengths is my reason for disagreeing. You’re entitled to disagree with me as is your option, but please take a look at the people who win in marketing.

Every product has its flaws - what is important is that you provide a good support network to help people through them if they come across them.

This is one double glazing salesman reporting for duty

(cue dodgy target ads for double glazing below this post….)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.