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Ideas for Mandriva Strategy?


iceyintel
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I just felt that maybe a thread like this would make suggestions for the way mandriva should run, because the current strategy right now is making mandriva suffer, mandriva is not even close to being a "life support" distro waiting for the plug to be pulled, but it it still time for mandriva to look for a plan how to expand.

 

Here are just some of my suggestions

 

1:Mandriva should sell Mandriva boxes in stores, so people can just walk into staples or best buy and pick up Mandriva Powerpack or Flash and try out the new distro.The $80 ( or $70 USD don't remember) box will shine a lot next to the Windows Vista $150-300 "upgrade only" boxes.Also expanding and trying to push the door into some big OEM, try to get DELL convinced that Ubuntu is not going to help them, or get HP or Gateway or someone, if that goes on computers that will be a lower cost then the windows equivalent will definitely be an eye catcher.

 

2: OEM deals will still be needed like the HP or DELL, but another way of doing it is to do it the apple way, instead of staples and best buy, Mandrakesoft can open the Mandriva store (or some catchy name instead) start out making a small store maybe in Paris local mall, sell OEM machines preloaded with Mandriva Linux, sell mandriva flash and boxes, linux "how to" or mandriva bibles or something.Sell hardware and software like "cedega" and maybe speakers, headphones, or if mandriva really wants to get into, sell mandriva compatible hardware, like ex. geforce 8800 GT or Intel i7 core 2 quad or something.In the back of the store, mandriva can offer "mandriva training" newbs can get training on basic to advanced things on Mandriva and opensource software, for maybe a fee like "this X amount for 1 month, 3 month, or 1 year" or whatever.Plus, even if the apple store is next door, with this crushing economy, people wanting to give the computer with an "anti windows, microsoft is the devil" that apple tries to brainwash people with, mandriva can easily steal customers with stuff like "not just 1 platform, its pc and mac" and with apple's high computer prices, mandriva offer great offers with competitive prices wil make shoppers think twice, and say "hmmm i can get a mac for $1200, but i can get a mandriva computer for $650 and i can get training for 1 year and still save money" or for box sells of people who hate windows "i don't want to spend $1200-$2000 on a new computer when mine is perfectly fine, but i can get mandriva for $70 and keep my computer" if mandriva gets soo eye catching front store enterance that will draw attention, and make a video to play in the stores for mandriva that makes it look cool.Get local advertisement in paris for the new store in the mall and ads in the mall, mandriva store may be a suecess, and then after it does well for a little start slowely expanding to other places like Madrid, Amsterdaim, London and etc, and when Europe is in strong control, expand to US/Cananda and built a store in New York, then either L.A or San Fransico, then start adding stores in smaller places like exp New Orleans, Charrlotte, Memphis, Fresno, etc.Big advertisement campaigns with catchy lines will be needed after getting past a couple of stores, then plan one can work here too, HP and Dell will see a new refreshing OS on the block.Mandriva should always though, always, think of the open source community though, and donate back to projects like WINE and KDE to keep the opensource community feel they wern't cheated.

 

Those are just my 2 suggestions , anyone feel free to make your own , this is an open thread.

Edited by iceyintel
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I agree with the Mandriva boxes in stores and Mandriva has done that in the past at least, in the UK, PC-World was selling them.

 

Also OEM deals are very important both for revenue and to make Mandriva more known again, I think Mandriva should push themselves especially for Netbooks as it's better suited than any other distro, being most user friendly and already made compatible for lower resolution screens.

 

I don't agree with the store strategy, stores cost a lot in fixed costs and don't reach that many people.

Two or three online stores, one in the US one in the EU and maybe one in Brasil (to take advantage of the Conectiva past), selling preinstalled netbooks, laptops and maybe some mini-desktops (Asus eee desktop and similar) would be better, this would reach already a market of about a bilion people.

 

I think the most important thing though is to greatly improve the marketing and PR, there are too many people these days that associate Linux only with Ubuntu (and RedHat and Suse for business use), Mandriva needs to increase the buzz around it's distro, push it as the best, most user friendly Linux distro available, up to the point of directly pointing out it's superiority versus Ubuntu.

It should get to the point that every time some online or printed magazine talks about Linux, they should mention Mandriva as the best distro (as currently happens with Ubuntu), not just the occasional review twice yearly when a new version of Mandriva comes out.

Edited by tux99
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They could also have one of their head gurus provide an article for national computer magazines. Doesn't have to be mandriva specific, but if its mandriva based, then that will also increase awareness.

 

All we hear here in Australia is Ubuntu, fedora and suse, but all articles are written using ubuntu......I simply hate the theming and colours so have never even tried to get a stable system using ubuntu.

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Ideas for Mandriva Strategy?

 

Get a new CEO, learn something about marketing, stick to a strategy and don't change it every two years.

 

[sarcasm]

Currently, the best strategy for Mandriva is to stop business altogether. That way, the CEO couldn't mourn about financial losses. :P :cheeky:

[/sarcasm-off]

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Don't forget support, any support people had they were appalling at supplying. Mandriva Expert, was a waste of time.

 

So, marketing and support, as well as actually being able to sell the products somewhere on the internet - ideally multiple outlets would be ideal. Just not physical shops, because there's too much expense involved.

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Forget the desktop, the market is not enough to sustain a profitable product line for a company of Mandriva's size (this includes netbooks and OEM). I would be looking towards niche markets, possibly abandoning the management of the distro, and choosing to support the deployment of other commercial/non-commercial distros in a business environment until liquidity is restored to an adequate level. IMO this would be a more profitable use of the expertise Mandriva currently holds than maintaining a full distro that many do not pay for. They do not have the revenue base of the likes of Red Hat and SuSe to to invest heavily in the development of a distro that is given away for free, which IMO is reflected in Mandriva's bottom line.

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The only way is going the Redhat/Fedora and/or SuSE Enterprise/OpenSuSE way: a stable enterprise branch, as well as an unstable, testing Opensource one.

Of course this will make the free version unsuitable for new users, but that is that... no other way to survive.

And of course, avoiding the grave mistakes of the past would greatly help- namely, acquiring other distros for big bucks, and then using the worst parts of them for the main release, while dropping the best/greatest/most valuable ones to the well of obscurity. Connectiva's exhellent Smart Package Manager is a great example- instead of adopting it as the main package manager for Mandriva, they strangled it and insisted on the slow, buggy, wholly unreliable urpmi (frontend), which is IMHO one of the main reasons (together with the old+horrilble yum package manager) RPM based distros have acquired such a bad reputation.

Edited by scarecrow
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The only way is going the Redhat/Fedora and/or SuSE Enterprise/OpenSuSE way: a stable enterprise branch, as well as an unstable, testing Opensource one.

 

Problem is that in order to do such a thing you need a revenue stream typical of RedHat/Novell or some serious investment from another source. Mandriva's current revenue stream, is not sufficient IMO and I can't see them raising the money from other sources. Going up against the might of RedHat and Novell, replicating their business model is not a desireable investment opportunity (even for VCT's).

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Just remember, you need to spend money to make money.Mandriva is cutting corners everything, and they are ovisally arn't making money.

 

Maybe the stores arn't a good idea for now, but if mandriva starts bringing in money they could do that later on.Still, start small and work your way up with that idea.

 

I noticed the people who know mandriva love it, i was on a vista forum and this person bashed linux (she used ubuntu) and closed many threads, i told her about mandriva, helped her with a few of her linux issues, and now today she loves it and says she has it on her alienware and might put it on her mac.There was another person there who hated ubuntu but loved mandy.But they didn't know of mandy until i brought my mandriva "zealotness" according to some pro microsoft people.

Edited by iceyintel
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Agreed Mandriva should build upon it's current strength (solid reliable user friendly desktop distro) instead of trying to replicate the Redhat/Novell business model. I don't believe there is no money in a desktop distro, I believe OEM deals, if pursued agressively and on the other hand a retail packages (both physical boxes and download) like the Powerpack can sell well, providing Mandriva greatly increases it's PR and marketing.

 

With regards to the powerpack, I believe the download version should be cheaper maybe 25-30 Euros, this would lower the barrier for people to just buy it without thinking too much about the cost and therefore sell more units.

 

Also bundling Mandriva CD/DVDs with as many books about Linux (especially for beginners) can be useful.

 

As someone suggested earlier, Mandriva needs to get some of it's staff to write articles for Linux magazines, not just about Mandriva but about any Linux topic while using Mandriva as example.

Also a stall at Linux events, sponsoring of Linux related projects, discounts for students anything that get's them in the news and attracks attention, while not costing much.

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Agreed Mandriva should build upon it's current strength (solid reliable user friendly desktop distro) instead of trying to replicate the Redhat/Novell business model. I don't believe there is no money in a desktop distro, I believe OEM deals, if pursued agressively and on the other hand a retail packages (both physical boxes and download) like the Powerpack can sell well, providing Mandriva greatly increases it's PR and marketing.

 

The only OEM deals I can see are with netbooks, their low spec is exploited well by GNU/Linux, but Mandriva was far too slow to react to the netbook boom loosing out to Xandros, Linpus and Ubuntu, IMO the scope for new partnerships in this area very limited. As for your bog standard laptop/desktop, I can't see this area take off unless there's a major shift in legislation in favour of Microsofts competitors.

 

Both Shuttleworth and Red Hat have stated there is no money in the desktop market. Shuttleworth says this despite creating and bringing a popular desktop distribution to the top within a year or so, if he was sitting on a potential gold mine, rest assured he would be the first to exploit it. Red Hat obviously knows where the real money is in terms of commercial linux products as they have focused on the key market area, servers, and made a fortune out of it. These people/organisations have proven that they know how to make money out of Linux, they have better knowledge of the prospective markets than you or I, therefore I am inclined to give significant weight towards their arguements.

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The only OEM deals I can see are with netbooks, their low spec is exploited well by GNU/Linux, but Mandriva was far too slow to react to the netbook boom loosing out to Xandros, Linpus and Ubuntu, IMO the scope for new partnerships in this area very limited. As for your bog standard laptop/desktop, I can't see this area take off unless there's a major shift in legislation in favour of Microsofts competitors.

 

Yes, OEM deals for Netbooks (and Mandriva is not late yet, no one says Asus, Acer, HP, etc won't switch distro if they believe it's worthwile), and those small desktop PCs like the Asus eee desktop. Netbooks have just started to become popular, they still have quite a future in front of them (especially also in developing countries).

 

Both Shuttleworth and Red Hat have stated there is no money in the desktop market. Shuttleworth says this despite creating and bringing a popular desktop distribution to the top within a year or so, if he was sitting on a potential gold mine, rest assured he would be the first to exploit it. Red Hat obviously knows where the real money is in terms of commercial linux products as they have focused on the key market area, servers, and made a fortune out of it. These people/organisations have proven that they know how to make money out of Linux, they have better knowledge of the prospective markets than you or I, therefore I am inclined to give significant weight towards their arguements.

 

IBM in the early 80s didn't believe there was any money to be made with personal computers either...

Edited by tux99
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Mandriva does need to focus on Servers and workstations, but making desktop just a free test platform would not be smart, why copy red hat and Suse? For one, why should mandriva do that?there are much better ways.And 2, how is mandriva going to all the sudden march in and try to beat Redhat and Suse at their game? They can't, they have to be creative on their business plans and stick with one.

 

Powerpack should stay in existence, only maybe a name change would not hurt either, powerpack to me personally sounds dumb and sounds like something for a "power user" which many newbs will think the same way. Don't just copy "mandriva home" or "mandriva premium" be creative, make it where the person looking into an os say "ooo i want to try that"

 

I would say, keep the price of powerpack, but add a longer subscription to cedega then the 1 or 3 month i so hear, thats like a trial, 6 months will see more acceptable, im sure making a good little deal with transgaming can bring the price down to affordable for mandriva and be a better buy for mandriva users.

 

I don't know, but powerpack needs something special about it that will give people a reason to buy it, for first of all attract people to mandriva, and 2 make people want to buy and not use free (but keep free because it looks better and can be more of a trail for some)

 

Mandriva will need to step their servers up, and make a workstation or office edition as well, OEM deals will need to be top priority at mandriva.Advertisement campaigns will be needed as well.

 

I believe there is money in the desktop ( look at apple, the mac is the fastest growing home computer, and apple servers are not what got apple to a 8.5% marketshare) but desktop alone can't be the cashcow.

 

Maybe mandriva needs to make a big program hit like itunes and firefox?

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Yes, OEM deals for Netbooks (and Mandriva is not late yet, no one says Asus, Acer, HP, etc won't switch distro if they believe it's worthwile), and those small desktop PCs like the Asus eee desktop. Netbooks have just started to become popular, they still have quite a future in front of them (especially also in developing countries).

 

When the first netbooks came out the majority were Linux only, now Linux netbooks are increasingly becoming a niche as the Windows marketing machine has grasped and taken hold of the netbook market with it's dirty fingers. The best time to get a foot in the door in this market was at the emergence of the market, with Microsoft out of the picture and the big players looking for distro's, but Mandriva (IMO) was nowhere to be seen (other than a partnership with some manufacturer nobody ever heard of).

 

The big players have chosen their partners and established their working relationships, clearly Mandriva the company or the distro failed to impress these manufacturers before now. If these relationships are to cease in the near future it will be because of performance on the part either the distro/manufacturer or increasing pressure from the market to supply Windows netbooks. Waiting for the former is not an appropriate strategy for any business and TBH not much can be done about the latter in today's current climate. You might argue that the distro on it's own may be superior to those already use netbooks and be able fire off a list of selling points in terms of Mandriva's own tools such as the installer and the MCC, but how much of this is actually necessary or desireable for a netbook, and how much of it is unique to Mandriva today?

 

 

IBM in the early 80s didn't believe there was any money to be made with personal computers either...

 

True, but back in those days market information was not so readily available as it is today (ironically the PC is one of the technologies that had improved this over the years), therefore decision makers today are in a far better position to analyse markets and have the potential to make better decisions as a result. Although to be honest, I believe it took a while after that for the PC boom to emerge.

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