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Date:      Sun, 16 Mar 1997 10:10:37 +0000
From:      Robin Melville <robmel@innotts.co.uk>
To:        Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu>, grog@lemis.de, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: "The competition"
Message-ID:  <l03010d02af5171da1031@[194.176.130.25]>
In-Reply-To: <199703160047.TAA02761@crh.cl.msu.edu>
References:  <5gffl5$4h9$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>

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At 7:47 pm -0500 15/3/97, Charles Henrich wrote:
>FreeBSD: What else?
>
>---
>
>Your looking for a high performance operating system, one geared towards your
>server environment, where high quality, high reliability and security are key.
>In the vast sea of Operating Systems what do you choose?  FreeBSD, there is no
>other choice.

I'm not sure that you're not missing the point. There is a difference between simple "informative" advertising (our widgets do this, that and the other thing), and product "sensitivity". The advert for Red Hat which started this strand was the latter. The only thing it said about Linux is that you get the source, but it was posed in such a way as to sensitise hacker types to the freedom and control that Linux supposedly gives them, and the key message was that "you are one of us, we understand you -- come join us".

The purpose of this kind of ad is to say "hey! we're over here" to people locked into other brands. The assumption is that they will then like the *concept* of your product and go on to to find out more. A good example is car ads.. a bad example is Apple computers advertising (in Europe at least) at the moment (it says "hey! look at our product, it can run Windows too" :/ ).

I would have thought that if you guys want to splurge FreeBSD, the key market is small/medium system managers who are looking to shift over to the Inter/intranet. They may already be running/fed up with/paying through the nose for Novell, NT, Apple servers, SCO, HPUX, DEC etc, and would probably try something new if they had a concept of it. 

They need to be reassured that free software isn't

* cobbled together by amateurs
* Full of holes
* flaky
* an application-free zone
* a support-free zone

Since FreeBSD is none of these things (as those of us who've taken the plunge can testify) we've got a flying start. But the first step is to catch their attention and get them to consider us as an option.

By all means give the down and dirty information in the small print, but focus on the /concept/ if you want impact.

Regards

Robin.






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