Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 22:33:39 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, "Greg McPherran" <sw2@mediaone.net> Cc: "FreeBSD Advocacy" <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Your Mascot Message-ID: <002f01c123b9$81e9f540$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <001b01c1233e$46397640$6501a8c0@ne.mediaone.net>
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-----Original Message----- From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Greg McPherran Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2001 7:51 AM To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Your Mascot Hello, >I'm Greg McPherran. I am a software engineer - 17 years. I'm all for FreeBSD >and am considering installing it. I advise you to use a different mascot >besides the little daemon. It's not good marketing. Note that I'm cc'ing this to Advocacy - this discussion properly belongs on that mailing list, not on Questions. Please followup there. FreeBSD is NOT a commercial operating system. Nobody here DIRECTLY benefits by increased use of FreeBSD. Many people INDIRECTLY benefit - but we have our own projects to market and we are going to prioritize what marketing efforts that we are going to spend on the companies and organizations and projects that directly pay us money. There is NO requirement that anyone selling commercial products or services that are based on FreeBSD use the mascot. If your planning on installing FreeBSD then great - but you should also read a bit about UNIX history. The demon logo has a history that started a long time ago. The fact that you even noticed it at all and felt the need to comment proves that it's doing it's job. If you know anything about advertising you know what I'm talking about. >Also, you could spif up your web site and really make it fancy. This will >attract people to FreeBSD. Unfortunately, your deluded here that putting a lot of spiffy things on a website will attract people to FreeBSD. There is not a single study with any credibility out there in Marketing-Land that shows that a spiffy website has attracted new sales prospects. The idea that just slapping a fancy website on the Internet will make people beat a path to your door is a bankrupt idea and all the Dot-Com's that thought this are bankrupt. If anything, the Internet has even more conclusively proven the need for narrowly targeted advertising and marketing. The Internet has not and most likely never will be a targeted marketing venue the way that radio, television and periodicals are. If anything, spiffy websites are usually created by people that think that spiffiness means a lot of graphics. Graphics that are large and take a long time to transfer. Studies have shown that people get impatient with a web page that takes longer than 14 seconds to load and will often cancel the page load and go elsewhere. Since the majority of people viewing webpages on the Internet are using 56K modems, 14 seconds at 56K does not give you a very big window to get your entire page transferred to the remote end. If you want to make it, you had better be running a very minimalist site. > As Microsoft knows very well, it's not just the >quality of the product - >it's the presentation. FreeBSD is far superior to >Windows in many ways. Why >not get the attention you deserve by marketing >yourselves much better? When I go to http://www.microsoft.com I don't see a very "spiffy" website, I see a front page that's mainly text. In fact it's layout and the layout of http://www.freebsd.org are virtually identical, the only difference is that the FreeBSD website uses a lot of Red, the Microsoft website uses a lot of Blue. I suppose if your favorite color is Blue than the Microsoft site might have an advantage. Hey - maybe that's why Novell isn't doing so well these days! :-) Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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