I’m still the opinion that the “Marketing Communications Plan” being (totally) insufficient to solve the current problem, not intended as offense to the author.
The Marketing Communication Plan shows the need for a whole business case for the company’s involved (including a market analysis and marketing plan (which includes a communication plan);
Still not pretty clear how two company’s can offer more or less the same product/services. Apparently it works
The quality in such a plan should of a quality that you could get inventors (a bank a private person) to lend/invest a couple of millions euro’s (or dollars/pounds) or even more; as there is realistic story with numbers etc.
Jonathon made quite some points. As I still don’t know what they see for example as their product? LibreOffice (software) or Support (L1/L2) or Tailored software solutions or Consultancy?
And are Governments/Enterprises actually interested in L1/L2 support; or is it done in house. And what do you call Enterprises. Those slow moving megalomaniac institutions with 5-10 year contracts… Hard to get to them. And you’re in a territory of the big an mighty. Microsoft nor other company’s want to loose (large) customers. Enterprises might use LibreOffice as leverage to get the price down and still ending up with say Microsoft. And they are in contact/contract with Microsoft anyhow (most of the time, I assume).
Personal market/ SMB market is far easier get some footing. But, surely a different kind of customer. With different questions, requirements. More of the shelf product. Less to no L3 services.
In which region the operate? Collabora/CIB.de (or what ever) delivers L1/L2 support in Chinese? Dutch? French? Swedish? Spanish? contracts are in local law of the company the service?
If the customer service is locked in Germany (multi language of course), do they answer also on Feiertage? There quite a list of them, I personally experienced ;-).
This is only the top of the iceberg. Quite a lot of things to consider. Even in in which currency you want to be paid. And has the brexit some kind of impact (no clue, only popping up).
And everybody now’s Microsoft (it’s a brand). I never heart of Collabora/CIB. There is no brand reputation (Adobe/Nike/Adidas/Zoom/Uber/Corel) . Not sure about the home country. Or certain company’s surely not a common name.
And CIB has clearly not much respect for other languages. I’m French and go to https://libreoffice.cib.de (which language will I get?)
Or the product pricing. You it is really possible to price a product too low!. 18 pounds for a seat, impossible. Their must be a catch.
Or what! 18 pounds, for LibreOffice I can get to free. They are crazy! Why should I pay.
A) Based on the current situation: there is no single Enterprise edition; which the name suggests. There at least two editions from two different company’s.
B) As Enterprise Edition is defined by targeted audience. However still unclear what you define as an Enterprise (and the country interpretations)
C) The edition has next to nothing special compared to fresh or master; except incremental updates and templates for deployment (from the negative perspective)
Those forks of an older edition of LibreOffice with a bunch of backports. Or is it about services?
NGOs/University using LibreOffice TBD → No, no, no. They need security fixes; And maybe deployment advice. They are no different from Enterprises. They should be contracted. What type of contract; different story. Maybe for free, but still using an eco-partner. You need to make good impression :-). And you get experience with all kinds of setups. Foots on the ground… Maybe someone starts a spin off at the university … Which Office Suite should they use.
LibreOffice Community (can’t be name of product) as there is LibreOffice Community. Edition is wrong. As TDF only supplies one edition. LibreOffice. [Note: I’m objecting against the Community edition as a term. Could make sense in different legal structure, but not with the role TDF currently has. [Note community still communicates cripplewhere. It’s a loaded terminology already. You can’t get that out of your head. And telling is something different is only confusing and frustrating thing to do.
This commercial problem maybe already been solved years ago. Didn’t happen. Impossible to undo. However you can’t make good the lost time by skipping all of the guidebook writing a a business plan and rushing into something. This is a recipe for disaster. Of course even well long debated proposal can go wrong and visa versa you might and up lucky with quick move. However I’m not quite convinced this will work out well (type of prediction pretty pointless; as it’s not specific enough… so happy to give a list of possible problems if asked for)
I really get the desire for a change. And I get the urgency. But as rushing software project ends up in buggy (crashing) software; end a rushing business plan/ marketing strategy being buggy (with worst case default). And in both cases a bad impression. FWIW: Marketing includes Product. So it can be even the department Marketing deciding what developers should build, to comfort the needs of the market. So not what developers think the market wants but, what marketeers found as what the market needs. Reality is somewhere in between, a developer can have a ingenious idea which where marketing is more limited advertising.
Code refactors need careful preparation too. quite some investigating/conceptual thinking before acting. Or do you just start at some point and see where end up; I assume design choices are made?
Or do you only rush of doing the first best thing coming to mind. This is nothing different only a different topic and different problem. Maybe boring for people who prefer code.
You can have great invention/product, but without knowing where and how to marked it. Both aspects need to be properly done.
And the whole TDF structure as community with company’s contributing to code for free, might not be the right model. The code can still be open source. And a community maintained. But has LibreOffice to be supplied by a Stiftung?
The Mission of LibreOffice doesn’t fully align with the eco-system partners interest. Not sure what the Idea of the Founding Fathers at the time was to opt for a Stiftung. Separated entity from company because of Oracle debacle?
A Stiftung now causing headaches, because LibreOffice supplied by TDF is making commercial branding hard (TDF being software vendor). And even creating problems for more commercial approach.
Redirecting etc. So more sites more complexity. More complexity less transparency for customers. Less customers. KISS principle. And this does affect the imago of the the company’s involved. The services of the eco-system partners maybe working the same way
You can’t burden the outside customer with internal organizational dilemma’s. As the order of Ecosystem partners at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
Who invented to routing system. An example solving an internal issue. However the customer still has to pick one. I’m personally still confused where to go… Yes, it inherit at the model of open source with multiple company’s contributing and everybody having a fair share… but this from marketing perspective not desired. And that’s putting it very very subtle.
LibreOffice is actually a multi-venture of couple of company’s with a community and some volunteers. Maybe new structure should be invented to accommodate all interest properly.
The problem of the eco-system partners is legally not an issue of TDF. Practically a different situation as LibreOffice being powered by eco-system partners (and some volunteers). From code perspective.
Translations/documentation is probably a different story. I would say Translations and documentation being free beer for the eco-company’s?
There are quite number of variables to take in account. And the whole community/open source aspect/ multi company involvement doesn’t make it tremendously hard to market it in a commercial customer friendly with stepping on toe, feet, finger, hand of somebody? Twister somebody. An in contrary to a source code where quite a number of variable are laid out already working pretty logical most of the time, it’s hard to tell what all variables are and how everything is connected. And what people are saying and what the actually intending to say. Everybody reads/interprets a book differently. Sometimes major difference occur, sometimes minor difference sometimes even so small you might not even notice).
Note: not knowing much about coding/building a program; so might be biased with stereo types and such. So I my attempt to use analogy maybe totally flawed. And trying my best to contribute something.
Telesto
For the record: I skipped the online part :-). Is TDF going the do deliver the services for paying customers? Redirect to a partner Nextcloud with a 5% share revenue to TDF and 95% for Nextcloud? Or Collabora doing this? Random options, random story.
Op 15-7-2020 om 19:19 schreef Italo Vignoli:
On 7/15/20 6:36 PM, Kev M wrote:
I still don't like slide 46: "...focused on needs of individual users" -
Why can't it say only "you are using the volunteer supported version of
LibreOffice" - or "you are using the volunteer supported version of
LibreOffice, this version does for enterprise/professional support
services please see [URL to Enterprise page]"
That has still to be discussed.
Slides 49 & 50:
I think the board will have to vote on this. Italo's perspective is the
opposite of some of the other engaged users on this issue. Based on the
slides, he sees Personal as implying no restrictions, while Community
does. Others, see it from the perspective that Community implies no
restrictions, while Personal does. Aside from doing a randomized market
research survey of 1,000 respondents there will be no empirically
researched right answer.
Actually, the name Personal has been suggested by a branding specialist,
based on a knowledge database of thousands of names (he is a friend and
a former colleague, so I paid him with rigatoni alla gricia and a good
bottle of red wine, but he is usually far more expensive).
Slide 55:
.business is and improvement to .biz (at least in North America), but
why not Libreoffice.com for the commercial version, and Libreoffice.org
for the Community, etc. version?
Because libreoffice.com is owned by TDF, and we cannot promote an
enterprise product on a TDF web property, as otherwise we would risk to
lose our charitable status. So, we need a compromise.
62: Strongly suggest not adding a Start Screen to LibreOffice online for
UX reasons. There's no need to create a barrier to accessing documents
online when none of the other providers have this layer.
The document just confirms that the start screen is missing, and does
not even hint to add one.
