Hi everybody, I have spend the past few weeks thinking and talking about how marketing can help Debian get more users, which was set as one of the goals. The funny thing about this goal is, though, the number of users can't exactly be determined as registration is not required. Perhaps we can set a goal in number of extra website visits which might be the result of this marketing effort. This matter has been subject of discussion with marketing gurus, entrepreneurs, consultants and a few economics students and they all found the task at hand a challenging but difficult one. A lot could be written about why distros like Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu have become so popular and well-known but I think one can be brief given the fact that a great deal of money has been put into well-organized marketing campaigns. One of the strong points about Debian is of course it's organization, the packaging system and the release cycle philosophy (not sure about the term but meaning the stable, testing and unstable branches). Problem is that these don't necessary result in a larger user-base or more generally speaking, the popularity of Debian itself. Let me be clear about this, the mentioned strong points do give us the opportunity to 'grow' because the foundation is solid. Now, how to turn all these strong points of Debian in something that will make it more popular. I think there are a lot of possibilities but the more interesting (and possibly the most powerful) one is to extend the business around Debian itself. Make businesslike people understand a decent profit can be made from services around the distro. This way marketing will be done by them rather than by Debian itself. The only thing is they have to somehow use the name Debian rather than creating an Ubuntu-like distro that's being shipped into bookstores with cute furry mascots. In other words, let companies do the 'actual' marketing and let Debian's marketing strategy be finding and guiding these companies into making their business in to a success. cheers, Richard
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