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Our Blogs Open Sauce Why GNU/Linux needs slick marketing
Our Blogs Open Sauce Why GNU/Linux needs slick marketing | Why GNU/Linux needs slick marketing |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 19 September 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 You can't sit back in an armchair, cut yourself off from the world, write something on a website and then wait for the rest of the world to discover it. That's what all those who got caught in the tech wreck of 2000 were told - and they paid a heavy price. You can't build something and expect the people to come there any more - you have also got to shout about it, loud and long. After shouting for years, you are probably lucky if one-tenth of one per cent of your intended audience has heard about you. And that's how it is with GNU/Linux. Those who know about it and can use it with some proficiency, are quietly satisfied, happy troopers. The rest of the world, and that's a massive majority, don't know. At least some percentage of them would care if they knew. And to make them aware, you have to use slick marketing techniques. I justify it on the grounds that the product is good and can live up to the claims. If a product like Vista can be sold by using slick marketing, then imagine what such marketing would do for a product like Linux. Why do we acknowledge Albert Einstein as the inventor of the theory of relativity and not Henry Poincare? Why do we give credit to Thomas Edison for inventing the light bulb when Joseph Wilson Swan invented and patented the first working one? Why do we not celebrate Antonio Meucci as the genius behind the telephone, and instead give Alexander Graham Bell the credit? I could go on with example after example, but the argument is the same: slick marketing by the American marketing machine has sold us these ideas down the years and plenty of people have bought them. Better than that, we've also been sold the myth of the great democratic nation, the "leader of the free world." What's wrong with slick marketing which deals with the truth? What's wrong with spreading the word through slick messages that resonate in order to disseminate the truth? |
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