Instead of “Leading” with Linux in product marketing messages, consumer product makers should offer information about the product’s value.

Leading with info about Linux won’t educate a consumer. It will confuse them. Describe why the device will help the consumer, and then casually mention Linux somewhere in the descriptor.

In a competitive market, companies maintain & gain market share by brand differentiation. In competition it is vital that the brand image be preserved.

As Mr Lovasco noted, if users aren’t told that the budget device they’re buying won’t run any of the packaged software & games on sale even at the same retailer, they will soon perceive Linux as something “cheap & nasty”.

Imagine the bad press when a hard-up family scrapes together just enough for an Eee for their child’s education, only to find that the “100 great arcade games” CD doting grandma buys for said child’s birthday just won’t work. Yes, Think Of The Children.

Put simply, what The Var Guy is proposing will tarnish the Eee’s brand, and probably all of Linux by extension. Word-of-mouth and viral marketing works both ways.

That’s probably the main reason why Wal-Mart’s multiple attempts to sell low cost Linux-based systems have failed. The average retail customer doesn’t know anything about their OS, and so will never ask “will this run X program.” Since Wal-Mart doesn’t really have a dedicated sales staff for computers, no one volunteers this info, and so the customer buys it not knowing…and then brings it back.

I think the best “Linux marketing tip” is simply educating the consumer — but in ways that won’t scare them away…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biRzKj3XxCY

Ooh!

They sold a lot of them, especially to bank branches, as like Linux can talk to a Windows database, they could talk to an IBM one.

The ASUS EEE software talks to cloud computing portals, especially those of Microsoft’s main competitor. I have their distro running on an old P3 256MB laptop with a wireless modem. It is quite adequate, except when my pre-teen grandchildren fight over whose turn it is.

This of course is the ASUS EEE market. Pre-teens and teenagers, who are used to communicating on a mobile phone, and want something a bit bigger they can pop into their small backpack, and watch video clips, and play music, and chat without straining their thumbs, and play online games or wireless network with each other, and maybe use Google docs to put together a school assignment.

Us old last century Linux geeks still have PS3’s to play with if we really want o show the teens what’s what.

I believe we the geeks actually do over think the whole user experience thing. You have many users that would be completely lost if you have them Windows with all the desktop icons rearranged or the task bar at the top instead of the bottom. If you just let the users hop on and let them learn the icons most times they’ll be fine. For documents you may need to tell them about formats so that they can share with others but thats about it. The only people complaining about differences in Linux are the wannabe geeks that think they know something but are still just memorizing Windows icons. They are the ones that complain about installations because they don’t know about deb files etc. etc. The average user from what I have observed would be fine. They have to learn Vista so why not Linux.

My wife saw it on the costco e-mail she receives and the only thing appealed to her was the fact that it was pink.

My gut feeling is that people may not equate the Eee as a real laptop, but to some “other kind” of electronic device; like the iPod. Think about purchasing a leapfrog kiddie laptop, they would not think that it is a microprocessor running a specialized eeprom programming; because the educational games are “enough for children”.

The same kind of psychology might apply to the Eee.

Just a thought…