Linux and marketing: a rant

I had a similar rant to this in my drafts section. Then I wrote a new one because the old one went a little off message. Here it is.

It’s kinda one of the basic bits of knowledge you’d pick up on any course on business you’d care to mention; sell your product well. Don’t skimp on advertising or proper branding, because it’ll pay dividends. Nobody wants to buy an orange-flavoured canned drink called Shittysmellyshitjuice, they’d rather buy one called Orangina or Fanta or Sunkist or whatever. Shittysmellyshitjuice could be the most fantastic orange soda you’ll ever drink, but with a crappy name like that it’ll be lucky to obtain even a minute market share.

Open source software and Linux advocates don’t like businessmen, or marketers, because they get in the way of technical quality, or so they’ve heard on Slashdot. Leaving aside the obvious truth that right now the main barrier to technical quality in the FOSS community is in fact the FOSS community, this revulsion towards marketers comes part and parcel of the boiled-down approach adopted by many – “the software matters, all else is frippery”.

Sadly, going back to my shitty orange juice analogy, frippery is what users care about. If you don’t brand your project properly, all you’ll attract are the FOSSies who don’t care about image. They would do well to remember that a good, solid brand can do a lot to paper over many otherwise gaping cracks in many a company’s surface.

Take a look at Apple. Apple is what Microsoft would be like had the latter developed a fetish for control over its platform that their present day counterpart would shit themselves over. They’ve had numerous instances of manufacturing defects and some fairly questionable policies regarding the aforementioned lock in. The average Joe can forgive them this though since they present themselves so well, and make an effort to appear friendly – not just through corporate image, but through how they interact with their users, developers and customers right down to UI design. Apple does branding to the same extent as RMS does zealotry and ESR does guns.

Specifically, look at iTunes. iTunes itself is a great name; it sums up what the application does in an instant; it plays tunes. Great. Its icon is a big blue musical note suspended over a CD – even better, because that communicates precisely what it’s for. TextEdit is another good example – clear name, clear icon (a pen and paper). iCal – clear name, icon of a calendar. Mail – OK, well, that’s just unfair. The point is that each of these applications is named such that a user can understand exactly what they’re about without even needing to open it, and with icons well chosen enough that the user might not even need to see the name to know what the application does. That’s good branding – not a strategy specific to Apple or OS X, I hasten to add, it’s just common sense.

Now look at some of the big-name Linux/FOSS apps. Start big. GNOME is a desktop environment. GNOME’s icon is a foot. If you asked the typical Windows user what an app named iTunes with an icon of a CD does, they’d most likely hazard a guess that it plays music. Ask them what something called GNOME with an icon of a foot does and they’ll ask you what the fuck you’re talking about. Bad branding; GNOME’s name and icon doesn’t correspond in the slightest with what it does. GNOME fails.

Let’s try again, this time with FOSS stalwart GIMP. GIMP is a terrible name on so many levels. First of all, it has an acronym within an acronym for a name, not to mention it’s actually a recursive acronym within an acronym, which is esoteric to the point of madness. Secondly, it doesn’t bear any relation to what the GIMP does – someone seeing “GIMP” in a menu is unlikely to think “Ah, that must be where I airbrush my face out from homemade porn before I upload it to LimeWire,” they just won’t know what it is. Last but not least, people think of “gimp” as being an offensive name for a cripple. Which it is. Stupid, stupid branding.

This is conclusion one of this rant, which I’ll admit is a little bit too good natured for that title at present; in-jokey, obscure or technical names = bad branding. FOSS is littered with examples of this; Kopete, Amarok, Pidgin, Ekiga, GNOME, GIMP. Most of these words mean nothing to people, and the ones that do have a meaning to your everyday user will most likely provoke a negative response. An in-jokey name is fine when you’re making something low level or aimed at a specific audience, but for general audiences, it’d be best to choose a name that actually symbolises what your product is all about. Good examples of this in Linuxland are Rhythmbox and OpenOffice.org – both names that communicate everything an inquisitive user needs to know before opening the application.

Moving away from the branding aspect, let’s move into marketing territory. FOSSies are shit scared of marketing and marketers, for the simple inescapable reason that people would rather pay money for something sold well than take something for free that was largely made and advocated by a bunch of pricks. And when you want prickishness, you want freetards.

First of all, many attempts to sell Linux or OSS are made on the basis that it’s “free” – not as in beer, which does tend to sway some minds, but as in speech. They fail to realise, sadly, that “software freedom” is not a priority for most people; they really couldn’t care about their “freedom” to fork their instant messenger if they can’t resize a text box so long as they can get their work done. They’re not as emotionally invested in their computers as the average freetard, and promoting Linux to them on that basis makes it seem like what it is – an esoteric, closet OS for nerds. The same goes for DRM and such topics, which really turn the average Joe off; they simply don’t care, and for those that do care switching their entire OS is probably a bridge too far.

Secondly, lots of sales pitches for Linux are not founded upon showing off Linux’s supposed strengths and what it can do, but often upon Windows’ weaknesses. The former would be positive, and give people a reason to switch; the latter is negative, and makes out that Linux isn’t better than the competition, only not as bad. This is often accompanied by the flinging of insults at said competition, which in the eyes of the average person definitely doesn’t help – smearing Windows won’t make anyone switch to Linux, it’ll just put a Windows user on the defensive, saying things like “Well, I’ve never had any problems etc etc etc.” If nothing else, counterproductive.

Thirdly, there’s too much fragmentation. While “choice” is a lovely mantra, it’s a stupid mantra. Some choice is fine; the choice between Windows, Linux and OS X is a simple choice that people can research. But, there are numerous Linux distros; Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS being the main ones, along with a far larger number of far smaller distros, and again, the average user doesn’t care. They’ve been told about this “Linux” thing but don’t want to have to pick from so many choices, since it makes no sense to them. Having a choice makes sense if it’s reasonably possible for the average user of your product to make an informed choice; you can pick which supermarket you shop at based on service, quality, price, whatever, but the differences between the different distros are often deeply esoteric and confusing for someone uninitiated in the differences between Debian-based, Red Hat-based, Ubuntu-based etc.

So that’s conclusion two: lots of attempts to get people interested in Linux fall flat because they are either not given an adequate reason to choose it (or one they can relate to), given too many equally incomprehensible choices to choose from or both.

Oh, and there’s another conclusion: they could also try not making Linux suck fucking shit. That might also work.