OStatic

Seth Godin has some advice to marketeers and businesses that open source proejcts should take to heart as well. Godin writes today about embracing the lifetime value of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

Godin writes Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

Reading Sam Dean's piece on the absence of linux marketing brought back memories, many of them painful, of my involvement in Linux International, back in the day. For you kids today who only know your Linux Foundation, Linux International (LI) was founded by Jon 'maddog' Hall as a vendor-driven organization to, among other things, protect the Linux trademark. One of LI's initiatives that began in early 2000 was a marketing plan to be jointly funded by the vendors. You can read my call to action from that time begging and pleading for the members of LI to band together to do *something*.

Then, as now, the problem was the cacaphony of noise from various vendors, each with their own spin on Linux. Was it a desktop thing as Eazel and Ximian proclaimed at the time? Was it an enterprise dark horse as backed by IBM? Was it a really great web server, as VA Linux and Red Hat were promoting? All of the above? While multiple Linux markets have continued to grow since then, there does not appear to be a solution to the general problem.?

Today, I was looking at a couple of interesting news and opinion pieces that made me think of an unfortunate truth that we've written about before: Linux has no marketing. The first piece that got me thinking about this problem was Roger Grimes' post on how the Mac platform is much less frequently targeted by hackers than Windows, because it's much less entrenched. That's even more true for Linux, where users have nowhere near the number of security headaches as Windows users have. The other piece I noticed was this one, which points out that even though the official release of Windows 7--expected to be Microsoft's first hit OS in many years--is three weeks away, it's already running on one in 67 personal computers.

Windows 7 has the potential to close the door on opportunities for Linux-based netbooks, and shut a lot of people out of new opportunities to try open source applications. And yet, I don't doubt that the hackers and crackers will be all over Windows 7, circulating new breeds of malware aimed at it. What if Linux had coordinated marketing behind it, and a targeted advertising campaign made the point that Linux-based netbooks can boot faster and are vastly more secure than Windows netbooks? That just might work, if it weren't a pipe dream.

Recently, there's been a lot of noise regarding Linux netbooks -- from how well the devices have sold to the return rates. Sam mentioned in a post that reasonable expectations need to be set for netbooks.

I agree with Sam on this point (which applies to more than netbooks, when it's fully considered). These machines are designed for basic tasks, not to serve as a complete office substitute when traveling.

In the last few days, I've begun to wonder if Linux based netbooks are having to fight another battle -- messages from the media and retailers that seem at odds.

Our own Joe Brockmeier made some great points recently about why free isn't enough. He says that smaller open source projects need to be just as mindful as the larger companies when it comes to PR and marketing because free isn't enough to carry the day. That's true, but PR isn't enough either.

This post by Dan Kusnetzky highlights one of the things that open source and free software projects have to contend with: Free isn't enough to carry the day.

A key challenge faced by any open source project is getting mindshare. Itﾒs a truism that if decision makers donﾒt know about a product, they wonﾒt consider it. If they donﾒt consider it, theyﾒll select other approaches. There are too many people shouting out their own Xen messages.