Not too sure - there aren’t any contact details on there. I like the tutorial videos though.
Hi all,
A lot to read (and respond to), so let me get straight to the point:
- I like @roiredxsoto’s idea about creating a Marketing forum topic. Could one of the forum administrators please step in and create a new topic for us?
- I agree with @extrowerk’s concerns about misconceptions that we are still using GCC2 - there are some other misconceptions about the project I’ve seen as well. I am planning to perhaps update the website FAQs or make a blog post to address these misconceptions. Additionally, I will update the website as suggested by @PulkoMandy to note that we use GCC8, not GCC7.
- extrowerk’s summary of the different comments on news sites, is in my opinion, quite accurate. I’ve been searching for mentions of Haiku in the media and always do look around in the comments to see what people think. I agree with the concerns extrowerk has raised too, regarding how we’ll combat negative comments on news sites. My response to this is that the Beta status of Haiku is something to be emphasised and that we need to also tell users that everything may not always work (whether that be devices and hardware or parts of the OS itself) - I think @PulkoMandy has said that most of our existing end users treat the OS like a hobby/experimental OS, and they like to tinker around and explore it and respect its limitations and disadvantages in its current stage. If users don’t want to use Beta software then Haiku is not suitable for them at the moment.
- extrowerk’s concerns that people’s attention spans are short is true too - we are planning to use short-form social media posts to grab people’s attention, and now that I think of it, we could make some adverts that advertise an advantage of Haiku but can be understood very quickly.
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@Sebrof’s suggestions about the target market are good and give us a group to focus on promotion for, but I think that Haiku should be an OS aimed (and promoted) at all general desktop users - we are actually similar to all OSes in some ways and I don’t see why Linux users wouldn’t believe that Haiku is easy to use - the majority of Linux users already use a beginner-friendly distro like Ubuntu so they just need to get used to the UI to make the switch.
Additionally, I don’t think we should treat Linux as a “competitor”. We’re not a company, hence other FOSS projects that are similar to Haiku are not “threats” but projects we can learn from and take inspiration from. FOSS is not meant to be competitive, it’s meant to be friendly and collaborative and I think we should keep it that way.
I agree that non-Western users may be interested in Haiku, however, we need more people on the team who are fluent in other languages to be able to target those users too. I also agree that the basic apps and media software should be enough to satisfy users, and we are making good progress, if not already there - @Diver and @3dEyes have done some excellent work porting the KDE apps, which cover the average user’s needs.
I also agree with Sebrof’s idea about approaching companies making low-cost devices about whether they are interested in doing Haiku as an OEM. However, we’d need to be at least R1 so the OS is stable enough to use and preload on a device.
Sorry, i went to far. I wanted to show how most user thinks.
I had EEE, it was a cheap way to test Haiku back then, i know about its limitations and flaws. The travelling point is while acceptable, became irrelevant: you forgot about the phablets/phones and other mobile devices and about the web based apps. Most use cases can be done on the phone, some wont be easy, or the result wont be as nice (resolution, effects, etc.) but most task can be done. Heck i can make my tax filings on the phone even! One buys a mini laptop on the road or for travelling only in extreme cases nowadays.
Regarding geographical targeting: sorry, that wont work, thanks to the globalization most folks wants the same thing. You can give them something else, but they wont be pleased.
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Again it depends on who your target audience is.
For example I post news about twice a year (in August for Haiku birthday, and at every release) on linuxfr.org. You can easily find these here as the website has a dedicated Haiku (and BeOS) section.
These are quite long articles because that site today is appreciated for deep dives into any topic. Sometimes I also put shorter press releases, for example here you have the announcement for Medo.
In all of these, not only I help the website team write the article itself (they use an open access model where anyone can work on in-progress content), but maybe more importantly I take part in the discussion in the comments, answering questions and so on.
So in this case it really isn’t short attention span. But there are other places where we do that (the various Twitter accounts talking about Haiku for example). I think there has been a bit less engagement there so far? Not that much replies to my tweets in any case.
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Agreed - for example people on news sites expect an article of at least 500 words, but social media users probably want something short-form like screenshots, short videos (less than a minute) or a couple of sentences.
Do you know who manages the social media accounts and how the promotions team could possibly get access to these accounts?
Jt15s, when I said that Linux was a competitor, I didn’t mean that we should be attacking Linux, or see it as a threat. I simply meant that both Haiku and Linux are alternatives to Windows (at least on the desktop), and it’s on Windows users that we should be most focussed.
When I worked in publishing, we described other similar publications as “contemporaries, not competitors”, so that might be a better term to use.
Ubuntu users are, by and large, people who have switched from Windows. I doubt that many of them will want to throw away their hard-earned Linux knowledge and switch again. And Ubuntu users are a tiny fraction of Windows users. I agree we shouldn’t rule out any market segment, but unless there are good reasons not to, it makes sense to focus resources on the biggest market.
And it doesn’t matter whether Haiku is a company or not; it’s a project to produce a viable alternative operating system. It’s legal status isn’t significant as far as marketing is concerned.
Electrowerk, conventional computers, with a large screen and a good keyboard, are never going to be replaced by phones or tablets in the world of work, at least not in the foreseeable future. Of course, these other devices have their place, but some people (many millions) do still do work which requires there to be a lot of data on screen, and who need to input a lot of words and numbers. I have an Ipad, and I still have the EEE, but proper work requires proper equipment.
Tell companies like Nestle that geographical targeting doesn’t work. And go to Delhi one day and see all the books (computer manuals and things like that) produced purely for the Indian market at a fraction of the cost of the same book in America or Europe.
While there, look at all the cheap consumer goods which you won’t find in the West. The world is far from global.
And of course, the nice thing about India as a market is that English is spoken more widely than in Africa or China, for example. The Indian sub-continent has nearly as many English speakers as the United States. Even Japan has 18 million English speakers. So there is a huge potential market even without any additional translations.
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I know the Twitter account is run by Waddlesplash. The login for the other accounts are (I hope) stored safely somewhere by Haiku inc members.
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For me you are arguing and stress the discussion until nothing is left.
Let the marketing Team do their work and support them!
yes it is a good program and ready to write about, no need to wait.
And this thread is about Haiku Marketing!
Thanks for the clarification - apologies for the misunderstanding! And yes, it may be good just to call them “contemporaries”. Reminds me of studying musical history. Anyways, you raise a good point about countries like India and Japan still having many English speakers. I will try and look into how we can attract users from those locales - one thing that comes to mind is our multilingual support.
Do you know which Inc member has the logins to the other accounts, or is it better to send a PM to all of them?
I am not a member of the Inc and I don’t know how they handle their password storage.
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FWIW Krita is still quite good for image editing, just not as capable as GIMP yet (much better UI though). As for digital art (e.g. painting, drawing, etc.) and animation, it can go toe-to-toe with proprietary solutions and even surpass them in certain areas.
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GCC 2 is something similar to Win16 support in Windows. It is still present in 32 bit versions, but usually not mentioned. Instead of GCC 2, “BeOS compatibility mode” words can be used without telling details. GCC 2 is a part of that mode.
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For short-form content, how about a series of videos showing off features of Haiku that can be of help to users like S&T?
Possible series names:
- Haiku Stanzas
- HaikuBits
- Haiku Tips
- Haiku Snips (as in snippets of Haiku)
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Videos are good and up to date with the time, but we need people who are good in this part.
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Good day,
This chart, from wikipedia :
shows operating systems’ market share only for desktop/laptop. With all devices included, Android is number 1.
It’s clear that Windows users make the biggest “fishing ground” target, followed by MacOS, Linux with 1.93%, mmmm… And every new year is going to be “the year of the Linux desktop” (this could turn on big debates in the Linux world, for sure). Haiku should be within the “Unknown”, sharing share with other minor oses. Then again, any user could be a Haiku user as long as what Haiku offers satisfies such user’s needs. In some use cases this is going to be harder than others, of course. Should that be analised too?
With kids’ first contact with technology being Android phones/tablets, iOS phones/tablets or Windows tablets, their interest would likely lean towards those instead of Haiku. And we all know the kids of today are the devs of tomorrow. Thus, how to get kids interested on Haiku with all the Win-Mac-Android-Linux noise around? This is a metaphysical-philosophical question which is not easy to answer. 
though getting kids on could be a nice achievement for the project, I presume.
Anyway, in order to know the starting point for any campaign I personally think we should know who we are, I mean the Haiku community, and by this I mean:
- Gather info on community members’ age range 0-10, 10-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40-50, 50-60, 60-70, 70-80, 80-90, 90+
- Gather info on community members’ gender
- Gather info on community members’ educational background (high school, university, community college, studies on physics, computing, philosophy, economics, …)
- Gather info on community members’ work background (laywer, priest, it engineer, medicine doctor, accountant…)
- Gather info on community members’ Haiku usage (daily driver, usually use it, seldom use it)
- Gather info on community members’ Haiku installation (bare metal, desktop, laptop, virtual machine…)
- Gather info on community members’ Haiku OS sharing (share computing time with Windows, Linux/BSD, MacOS, …)
- Gather info on community members’ reasons to switch to Haiku and from which OS
Of course, all that info anonymously gathered. That kind of poll would allow the marketing team, and all the community, to know the start point, at least the start point now, year 2021.
Then, with some project management SWOT matrix (Strengths, Weaknes, Oportunities, Threats), a good marketing campaing could be planned, and carried out. In order to know where to go, I personally think we should first know where we are. Those with longer presence here sure know better than me on this. 
All these takes time, lots of time, and effort, lots of effort, and from what I’ve seen, most people here work on Haiku on their free time, which makes these harder to get though feasible, again, with lots of effort, of course.
When I told friends I was switching my PC to Haiku entirely, the mac users replied with “that’s wishful thinking, BeOS was cool back in the 90’s, it’s not 1992 anymore, you are wasting your time”.( Hopefully I’ll be able to complete the switch this weekend 
). And personally, I think it’s not wishful thinking, it’s just most people are afraid of changes, and fear of the unknown… uuUUUUUUU… so scary 
. I think I just peed my pants with fear 
Actually, most things I can already do on Haiku only. I just need to figure out the few that still are fighting back 
I’m not certain about this, but I think that Haiku is not BeOS any more. Haiku has its own personality as an OS, and while it holds some “compatibilty layer” with BeOS, that is only available in the 32bit version. Besides, while still in beta stage, Haiku is already a grown up OS with its own features, some inherited from BeOS, some newly added, that make a cohesive OS overall. Thus, should Haiku stop naming BeOS everywhere? Is this something to think about? Is it time to leave “home” and fly free? 
There are many things, topics, matters, whatever, to think about to improve user base, acknowlegment, presence on media… As @Begasus told me once… “don’t try to get too many things done at the same time”, so best approach could be facing one step at a time, and always hang on. Look at the devs, 20 years working on Haiku and still there. Never give up! I’ll try to help as much as I can.
Regards,
RR
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I am sure Krita is great for image editing. But what photographers want is something to speed up the work-flow, and especially if they shoot RAW they need the ability to correct or optimise certain settings, often in batches. These are colour correction, exposure, and sharpening.
For me, that’s often all I need to do. If I want to do more, then it would be to work on individual images, and at that stage probably Krita would be fine. But it’s the earlier stages that I need…
I agree pretty much totally.
And I think that the slogan “Inspired by BeOS” may strike the right note. It harks back to BeOS, which is good, but suggests that it is not locked in the past, which is important.
And good luck with the switch.
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Really happy to read your thoughts with which very much agree as well ! Taking the chance to declare again how glad I am being a member of our community !!!
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On a technical level, a smaller OS can use caches more efficiently than a big OS. The code density affects that efficiency. Not only that, but there is also less hard drive swapping for the same amount of RAM. If we can keep Haiku slim and trim and at the same time rig up a WebAssembly-style bytecode for KDE apps to run on both Haiku and Linux, we can exploit that fact to outperform Linux for compute-intensive tasks. Then we only need 3D acceleration and reliable audio drivers. 
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