Why Linux flier, pt.2

Just some miscellaneous thoughts relating to the flier I’m working on, and a (god save me from my own pomposity) development snapshot.

• Thought the first. We will not mention Windows or OS X at a ll. Two reasons.
  • There’s already a flier for Vista, and I think it’s sufficient.
  • More centrally, Linux can stand on its own merits. For one thing, it’s bad marketing to always go on about your competition; if you have the choice between saying something good about you and something bad about them, say something good about you, it’ll bring in more business. For another, It’s about two years past time that we quit using proprietary software as our benchmark for “success,” it’s an idea that holds us back. Free software is better, and has been for some time now. The year of Linux on the whatever was 2005.
• Thought the second. Splitting it into two mini-pamphlets as originally envisioned was dumb, and I’m not going to do it. Also two reasons.
  • I talk too much, there won’t be room.
  • I’m personally uncomfortable putting a direct “this is an ad for my business” type of ad on the same piece of paper as a “this is an ad for Linux” ad. Yes, I sell Linux to people. But I’m always a little touchy about even marginally implying any sort of synonymousness (word? not a word? Firefox says not a word) there. I sell computers, and I show people how to use them. I didn’t make this stuff, and I don’t ever want anybody to think I did.
  • Okay, three reasons. Third being, like I said, I don’t make software. I sell computers, and I help people do stuff they want to do with them, and I write some mostly pretty uninspired and usually disjointed shit about them and hope that it helps folks, but I make no bones about where my skills are and aren’t. So this is a way I can give back, doing stuff like these pamphlets and having an open creative process and releasing the results of that process as free documentation. And in that spirit I should make it a priority to design this stuff so that you, Esteemed Reader, can take it and use it for whatever endeavor you wish. You should be able to pull my logo and contact information off almost anything I post here and replace it with your own info in two minutes.

Anyway, here’s a look at the work in progress. I haven’t settled on layout, images, placement or anything, it’s just a very rough sketch and possible headers. Tear it apart, please. Comments and suggestions gladly accepted.

whylinux-brochure-snapshot2

-p.

“Why Linux?” flier, first concept draft

What, I don’t post for a couple weeks and you think it’s just another flash-in-the-pan Linux blog gone with the wind, eh? Ha.

Matter of fact, I’ve been busting my friggin’ agates over here. Just got a pile of P4 desktop that I’ve been refurbishing for sale (amongst other more devious uses, but that’s a topic for a whole other post), and I’ve been putting a lot of thought into a new run of ads. A more proper, unified campaign this time around, none of that nickel and dime shit. I’m looking at bus ads, if you believe that.

But the fliers. I’ve got plans. In the past, the whole operation was kinda clever but half-assed, lots of different 8.5×11 ads for different purposes in different spots. Which has done pretty well outdoors, but has absolutely bombed inside (coffee shops et cetera), so I’ve been kicking around how to improve my eye-catching ability in such places. The Bad Vista pamphlet was the beginning of that thought process, and it’s been doing… okay. But I’ve got a slightly bigger plan than that in terms of coffee shop visibility, and I think it’s a good one.

So here’s the thought (or at least the prerelease draft thereof). A mobile propaganda station, with copies of several different pamphlets. Something that I could tack up on a board and instead of having to come replace it every week, come refill it every couple weeks.

Remember the 8.5×11 folders you used in school, with the pockets? Think half of one of those, tacked to the wall, with pamphlets and business cards and maybe even some magnets and shit inside. This is a winner, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, I’m better at writing pamphlets, they give me more room to talk and I don’t have to worry so much about making the layout all symmetrical and color-balanced. Second, if you’re in a coffee shop, you’re not going to stand there for five minutes and read my damn flier. But if you’re sitting down and hanging out for a minute anyway, you might grab a couple pamphlets and skim them while you’re waiting for your soup.

So all that was just a really long introduction to the first pamphlet that I’m working on for this (not counting the Bad Vista one), a general “Why Linux?” piece. (Another nice thing about this idea, I can work on them one at a time, edit and revise as needed, pull pieces, add pieces, whatever I want to do.) Attached is a pdf of the concept draft. Initially, I’m thinking a Z-folded pamphlet (as opposed to the letter fold I used on the Bad Vista piece). One side will be Why Linux, three pages. Flip it over, it’s Why Guerrilla Tech, three pages. Clever, eh?

Drop me a reply if you want to see the sourcefile, I’m doing it in Scribus. As always, I invite your comments, but please keep in mind that this is a concept sketch, literally twenty minutes of thought and five minutes of typing. Okay, have at.

whylinux-brochure-concept

-p.

PS: Yes, I’m also working on part 2 of the cmus howto! Thanks for the interest in it, it’s nice to know you’re getting read!

February marketing pt. 4

Now for the fourth installment in my ongoing series detailing the coming together of my new BadVista flier. When last we left our heroes, we were sitting on a pile of undistributable fucking garbage that defied everyone’s best efforts to get it to at least some semblance of printability. Problems included, but were by no means limited to:

• The screenshots were gawdawful. Too small to get any detail in them, poorly spaced, unreadable blobs of color. Absolute shit.
• Too goddamn wordy, as always.
• Poor spacing in general. The BadVista image only took up a small chunk of its horizontal space, but rendered the rest of the area on that general plane pretty much unusable.
• Everyone who vetted it for me said it looked like a magazine ad. We’ll come back to this later.

Mostly, I just didn’t have a very good vision for it. I was doing a flier because I always do fliers, but I was trying to fit a magazine ad shaped block in a flier shaped hole, and there’s only so much turd-polishing you can do. It was not going to happen.

February marketing pt. 3

February flier draft four million

Here’s the five billionth draft of the what I’ve taken to calling the Bad Vista flier. It’s made a lot of progress since I first posted the idea here, but I am still not ready to put this on the street. Some remaining issues:

• Still too many words, I’ve got shit just packed in there. But goddammit, I can’t cut this thing down anymore! If anyone could help out by hacking an inch or so off the bottom, I’d be most indebted.
• Sub-note: I need room at the bottom for a copyright notice on the Bad Vista image, which, of course, part of the FSF’s BadVista campaign. I’d also like enough room for the standard 1/2″ Guerrilla Tech footer, but that might be asking too much.
• Megan says the BadVista image isn’t big enough, but if it gets any taller, it pushes shit off the page. Any thoughts?
• Greg says the screenshots suck, and he’s right. I think the “help center” and “update manager” ones are all right, but the gimp one, which is supposed to anchor the whole thing, fucking blows, and it’s not at all clear what you’re looking at in the deskbar one on the left (yeah, that’s deskbar, I know it’s hard to tell).
• The “Power and Freedom” box is really hokey, but I want something like it to anchor the bottom of the page.

Please, if you’re going to make a comment (which I hope you will), try to print one out first, or at least look at a print preview of it. The flaws you might see on a computer monitor are totally different from what you’d see glancing at it in the coffee shop.

-pd-

February marketing thoughts continued

We’ve putzed around a bit more with the idea brought up in the previous post. Here’s the (very) rough draft so far:

So you finally got that new computer. You rushed home, plugged it in, turned it on and discovered… Windows Vista. Now it’s a month later, and you’re wondering why this sweet new machine that you paid top dollar for takes five minutes to boot? Feeling a little let down? Getting the suspicion that you could do better? You’re right. You deserve better.

It should be gorgeous. It should be fast.

It should come with all the software you need to be productive straight out of the box. You spent good money on it, you shouldn’t have to go out and spend more just to make it useful.

It should make sense. You shouldn’t have to hunt around to find the logout button. You shouldn’t have to tell it five times that you’re sure you want to copy a file.

It should be customizable. If you don’t like where that logout button is, you should be able to put it wherever you damn well please.

It should respect your intelligence, and help you learn as you work. Toys are for kids. Your computer is a powerful tool, and you should have the ability to let that power fly.

It should respect your integrity, and not treat you like a criminal. That’s your computer, bought and paid for. It shouldn’t spy on you or boss you around.

It should be secure. You shouldn’t need to waste your computer’s power running antivirus software that doesn’t really keep you safe anyway.

Guerrilla Tech Support has the cure. And you don’t need to buy a whole new computer to get it. Call Guerrilla Tech today and upgrade to Ubuntu Linux. Fast, secure, user-friendly, and fully loaded with the best Free Software applications available. Make that computer sing like you know it can. And you don’t even have to get rid of Windows to do it! You can use them both, learning your new system at your own pace. Choice, power, convenience. All the things you bought your computer for in the first place. Guerrilla Tech and Ubuntu Linux can deliver it.

Obviously way to verbose for an effective flier, but it’ll pare itself down as I start to format it. Now I need some pretty pictures. Stock screenshots will do for the point-by-point stuff, but I’m stumped for a main graphic. If anyone’s got some ideas on how to proceed with this, I’d love to hear them.

February marketing thoughts

Heard an interesting statistic this weekend, that computer shops tend to do the vast bulk of their new system sales in December and January. Which definitely jibes with my experience, and the dynamite business we’ve been doing in the last 45 days or so.

So now February’s just around the corner, and I’ve noticed business tapering off a bit (although a big part of that is that I’m damn near dry of donated machines, which is our biggest seller any time of year; if anyone’s got a line on some cheap parts, clue a brother in). So I’m sitting here thinking, given this interesting datum, which I cannot verify but am willing to believe, how do we turn this into an advantage?

And then it hit me. All those people that just bought a new computer over the last couple of months ended up with Vista. Which has been such an easy target for me lately that I almost feel bad; seriously, comparing any modern Linux distro to that lemon is like beating up a third grader. And as I’ve long maintained, fair fights are for suckers. Always kick a man when he’s down.

So with that in mind, I think it’s time to start brainstorming on marketing again. “So you finally got that new computer you’ve been waiting for, great! You rushed home, opened the box, dumped the packing peanuts all over the living room floor, plugged it in and turned it on and discovered… Windows Vista. And now, a month later, you’re wondering why this shiny new laptop that you paid top dollar for takes five minutes to boot? Getting the suspicion that you could do better? You’re right. And Guerrilla Tech Support has the cure.”

Discuss

Antifeatures

From Benjamin Mako Hill’s article Antifeatures, in the Free Software Foundation Fall 2007 Bulletin:

An antifeature, in the way I use the term, is functionality that a technology developer will charge users to not include… DRM and Treacherous Computing systems are, in many ways, extreme examples of antifeatures. Users don’t want either and they are hugely expensive and extremely difficult for developers to implement.

Region-coded DVDs, copy-protection measures, and Apple’s optional DRM music store–where users initially paid more for the DRM-free tracks–are also excellent examples. It takes a large amount of work to build these systems and users rarely benefit from or request them. Like blackmail (emphasis Pete’s), users can sometimes pay technology providers to not include an antifeature in their technology

Unfortunately, for the companies and individuals trying to push antifeatures, users increasingly often have alternatives in free software. Software freedom, it turns out, makes antifeatures impossible in most situations… Ultimately, the absence of … antifeatures form some of the easiest victories for free software. It does not cost free software developers anything to avoid antifeatures. In many cases, doing nothing is exactly what users want and what proprietary software will not give them.

This is an excellent example of what I mean when I talk about effectively marketing Free Software. It is not enough to simply say, “Try our product! We can do everything the other guy can do!” People already have something that does that, it’s the other guy’s product.

Where we can win, and where we must win, is in features that the proprietary software camp simply cannot match ever, due to the very nature of their business. There will never be Free Software adware, because somebody will code around it. Clicking on “About MS Word” will never give you a link to the developers’ personal email addresses. And my favorite example, the Debian repositories and the package management concept as a whole. Tens of thousands of Free Software applications, wrapped up, delivered, installed, and ready to run in seconds, for zero dollars. Those of us who take such a modern wonder for granted should really stop and examine what it means from the perspective of someone coming over from the other side.  “I can shop for software at three in the morning, naked and drunk off my ass? And it doesn’t cost me any money? Awesome!”

Proprietary software companies can’t touch this stuff, either because it would destroy their business model or because they’d just get their asses sued off. And that’s their Achilles Heel. I just named three features, off the top of my head, that proprietary software is not only not competing on, they can’t.

And this is how we win.

-p.

KDE 4: “Be Free”

A brief excerpt from Aaron Seigo’s blog:

a theme for our KDE4 promotion campaigns was also unveiled using the slogan “Be Free”. It was a long time arriving at those two small words… a lot of thought and planning in behind this. The core of the idea is that the freedom aspects of our software is a unique attribute of our projects, something our proprietary competitors can’t really match..

This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Stallman said in his essay Why Free Software is better than Open Source, “At present we have plenty of “Keep Quiet,” but not enough freedom talk.” There’s a commonly held (but still false) assumption among FOSS folks that Joe User doesn’t care about freedom. That’s a lie, it’s an excuse, and it hurts us.

Joe doesn’t know what freedom means. Why not? Because we have failed to explain it to him. Failed and failed and failed again. That’s job #1 here at Guerrilla Tech, it’s what I started doing this for. Spinning cubes aren’t going to win the battle for hearts and minds, people. They’re cool, I’m not trying to shit on spinning cubes, but they will not win the battle.

Here’s the bottom line. A very simple three step plan for everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present “How We Win:”

Show them that it’s better.

Show them that it’s free.

Show them that it’s better because it’s free.

Anyway, my hearty applause to those involved in this campaign for KDE! I very much look forward to seeing this (and the entire KDE4 project) unfold in the months to come!