I seriously hate writing overly long blog posts, but this turned into one. You are forewarned.
What can Linux and the Free Desktop learn from recent marketing campaigns by Apple and Microsoft? Let's quickly take a look at a few of the campaigns over recent years from Apple.
- "There's an app for that"
- Seamless hardware support with built in drivers
- Built in applications for digital media (iLife)
- Does not crash (quite debatable it seems)
- No malware or viruses
I was surprised how well they were able to comfort users about switching to OS X. The same qualms exist for Linux and in very similar ways.
Rather than worry about migrating existing applications to OS X, (iPhone really, but it still applies,) Apple comforted the user in knowing that anything they want to do can be achieved. With Debian, for example, there are tens of thousands of applications. Do we have an app for that? Probably.
The first commercials that came out for OS X talked about how hardware just worked when you plugged it in. No extra installation of drivers or finding installation cd-roms was needed. Of course, now that more hardware vendors are supporting the platform, it is no longer the case. Linux has an advantage here due to frequent release cycles. The consistent releasing of new software and drivers gives a leg up for supporting current hardware sooner. Granted, someone still needs to be writing those new drivers. But if GkH is right, then Linux also has more drivers than any operating system ever written.
Apple talks about their iLife applications a lot. They are good and all but we have acceptable alternatives for them. Providing a full Office compatible product is quite important and you don't see either bringing that up. Granted, I would love to see an application as sleek as Apple's Keynote or Pages.
They also made hardware that developers wanted to play with such as the airtunes device. Has anyone made an airtunes-like device (airport express) with just F/OSS software. I'd think that pulseaudio could do most of what is needed.
Each of the framework libraries perform a single task well. Yet, they all still integrate together. For example, an application can control external windowing animations. Say that I'm writing a book reader and when the user turns the page I want the page to actually tear off the application window and fly across the screen. This is just not possible in a practical way today. Now that X has compositor support, shouldn't it be available to the application to provide custom control? I would love to make Marina have a native newspaper interface and do exactly that. This is just an example, many facets of the system layer need fresh innovation.
There are tools to write to make our daily lives easier. Streamlining development will only make our time-to-market sooner.
How is Microsoft reacting to the marketing campaigns from Apple? They have a few failed attempts at using celebrities such as Seinfeld. But more recently, are the "Laptop Hunters" ads. These are quite funny as you will notice they get laptops that don't match what they claimed to have wanted at all. Most importantly, though, they are attacking Apple on price and trendiness. I guess they tout gaming on PC's too. Gaming, however, is a strange problem since the total market share of PC gamers relative to PC users is quite small. It's also shrinking as the Xbox, Wii, and PS3 continue to expand their coverage. Regardless, they are both beat on price.
Additionally, I thought the slogan "Life without walls" was funny since without walls you can't have windows.
Many pundits, myself included, have talked about how netbooks can totally change the game. The iPhone was similar in the phone market. Do you think it would have been as successful without the developer platform and thousands of applications?
So finally, how can we replicate the positive results Apple had? What is missing from our platform today (can linuxhator kick our asses into shape)? What are our weaknesses (and how can we fix them to become strengths). What story do we have to tell developers? What do we really enjoy about our platform?
Comments (8)
What do we miss :
- App Store like GUI which allow to have access to free software, but also to commercial and paying software
- A stable ecosystem with stable and mature API. I can install Firefox 3.0 and OpenOffice.org 3.1 on Windows 2000 ( 9 years old ), can I do the same on a 9 years old Linux distribution ? To develop under Linux, you first have to choose among a wide variety of lib and API ( OSS vs ALSA vs Jack vs gstreamer vs pulseaudio vs portaudio vs SDL vs …, gtk vs Qt vs lesstiff vs tk vs …, … ). Even once you have done your choice, you will have to cope with fast changing API ( without much of the time backward compatibility ). So for dev, and notably commercial dev, this is a pain. Now add the differences between distributions ( rpm vs deb vs tgz, version x vs version Y vs version X+specific patches, … ), and you can guess that this is a nightmare
- mature and well thought UI applications. Ok we have many applications, but are they amture ? Are they working well enough and with enough stability ? Do they have a good UI easy to use for beginners and pleasant to see ?See how well Apple applications are most of the time well designed.
- Last but not least : marketing. Without marketing, without a brand, Linux can’t be known and popular. Androïd run Linux, but how many people know it ? We just see Google Androïd or Androïd. The same for Palm Pre. So the Linux brand is not known. IMHO we should encourage people using Linux in their products to talk about it somewhere ( Linux logo on the product or in the manual ). We had “Intel Inside”, “Vista ready”, so what about “Built with Linux” ?
Linux might have more drivers in total for a certain point in time.
But it doesn’t matter. It might be annoying to install drivers, but at least they work:
_without requiring a new kernel_
(Which again requires new software, which might change a few features you rely on….)
The kernel folks are avoiding the ‘boring’ stuff of a possible binary compatibility by saying it’s a burden. Sure it’s a burden for the kernel developer, to do that. But they are just switching the burden to the user.
Also, it’s impossible for any vendor to create a product and ship it with linux support. Other than ‘Oh you should wait 6-12 months, then upgrade your software…. hopefully our driver is actually included’
GhK’s claim is marketing at it’s worst. It doesn’t matter how many drivers you have, it matters the the product in your hands work(!)
And lastly, you can’t create an impression of a cohesive product as apple has – it requires total control of everything from software to marketing. So don’t copy – but instead play the strengths… like diversity and why total freedom can help you.
what do we learn?
you need much much money
All great answers, and exactly what I wanted people to start thinking about
* “There’s an app for that”
* Seamless hardware support with built in drivers
* Built in applications for digital media (iLife)
* Does not crash (quite debatable it seems)
* No malware or viruses
So finally, how can we replicate the positive results Apple had?
Other than support by hardware OEMs I think it just isn’t possible; so people can receive a WORKING, 100% compatible, machine with a restore CD/DVD. For LINUX people are usually installing on a pre-existing machine with unknown hardware – it is just going to always be difficult to “support” that.
As for apps, hardware support, and not crashing – I pretty much think we are there. An openSUSE 11.1 GNOME desktop on supported hardware is very pleasurable to work with and never gets in my way of doing what I want/need. Apps like OpenOffice, F-Spot, Banshee, Firefox, Brasario, GIMP, Inkscape, at all top-notch. There will always be the “but they aren’t Photoshop!” crowd, but these are great applications that can perform tirelessly. I don’t know about an answer to iLife as I’m note aware of a STRAIGHT-FORWARD video editing package for GNOME/LINUX; the available programs work but also provide a byzantine number of options requiring one to know about codecs, audio, etc…
As far as marketing goes the community seriously needs to shed the “you can continue to use your i386″, “bloatware! bloatware! use twm”, and ideological crowds. I don’t know if that is possible but they seriously pollute and confuse the experience of new users with utterly unrealistic claims and send them off on unproductive tangents. In some ways we need *less* marketing of a certain kind so that positive-oriented marketing ["we have a great desktop!"] can ring through. Or to somehow amp the later over the former.
For improving the destop, from a developers standpoint, we need MUCH better documentation. Open Source provides some great frameworks, and tech like D-BUS and integration with the available apps are amazing, but unless your on the in-crowd for those specific developers you are totally alone in the wilderness. One of the reasons I’ve personally gone to .NET is that I can usually look-up answers directly rather then spending lots of time grousing about on Google looking for a forum or maillist post. But then enter Gtk#, etc… and it is often back to scrounging for morsels. It seriously slows down the process.
In regards to app store; really I don’t see the need. With the current state of package managers, openSUSE’s one-click-install, repositories, etc… I think we have something even better.
Do you really think technology alone is the issue?
I suppose you need a marketing expert to expand Linux beyond the geeks.
When an average people think of apple, the first word comes out is “cool”, they probably don’t care much about the other stuff.
Now how are you gonna beat that? Get some cool dudes/chicks on TV commercials playing with Linux?
sean:”When an average people think of apple, the first word comes out is “cool”,”
Let’s not overrate their success. They have a sub-10% market share, about 3x-5x the LINUX desktop market share (maybe, roughly?). So talking about the “average person” thinking their cools is a bit of a stretch. A self-selecting demo-graphic is at work here. Much like with social networking sites which are all the rage and “everyone is using them”. Lets define everyone…. A recent articled heralded their being >50 million SN users. By which they meant accounts; so if the average SN user is on more than one SN site that number falls ALLOT, maybe by 50% (or more?). And even if we take 50 million at face [false] value… 50M is ~1% of the worlds population. Many minor religions have more followers than that and they aren’t on the cover of Time. So I wonder if Apple is a great target for comparison; they are cool and ‘uppetty’, but they are still a gnat on the elephant. Sitting here in geek-space Apple looks like the wunder-kid, but is is really? Of course I can’t think of any better marketing campaign to study. Market leaders (which Apple is not) run very different, and much more boring, kinds of marketing.
That is a very apt point.
If we can’t get developers to want to use our platform, how will we get users.
This is why I think my main focus will continue to be working on making at platform that developers want to write things with.
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