Mandriva positioning on the Linux market
Par liberforce le mardi 22 avril 2008, 00:44 - Computers / Informatique - Lien permanent
Here's an insightful vision of the current Linux distro's market, from Dave Neary, former member of the GNOME foundation board.
I don’t want to pick on Mandriva, but it’s true that right now they’re aiming for the general consumer, the enterprise desktop and the enterprise server, and are not competing particularly well with the front-runners in any of those markets.
And I agree with him. Even if there was some good progress on the general consumer market, the short/mid/long-term strategy is still unclear...
PS: I also noticed that the free (as in beer) mention about Mandriva One disapeared from the french download page... I'm pretty sure it was there before...
Commentaires
I can still see the big icon for One download on french pages.
Concerning Mandriva positionning and issues, let me summaryze :
- Mandriva is not an US based company, so for IT, especially in USA, Mandriva is ... irrelevant
- Mandriva is very bad at communicating, especially for its enterprise products. Look at the Mandriva site. Screenshots ? Demo ? VMWare appliances images ? Articles on IT news site ?
And now a rant : Mandriva dev are very bad at communicating. How many time did you see a Mandriva dev post on planet mandriva/gnome/kde ? So for most people Mandirva is irrelevant.
No communication = no buzz = irrelevant
There's no point in having the best product in the world if nobody know about it ...
rant
{
Mandriva's marketing is the weakest link of this distro and yet it's the one calling the rules (e.g. Firefox as default browser in KDE).
moreover marketing is least comunicative/listening/trying to be better part of the company:
When did you last replied to a survey by Mandriva's marketing team?
As a paying customer I can't recall I ever got one and as a long time supporter of Mandrive I really wish things were different (not specifically regarding surveys).
}