« Open Source at Microsoft | Main | Iptables Attack Visualization »
July 26, 2007
Brand it: How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps
Last keynote of Thursday morning at OSCON 2007 is Steve Yegge from Google talking about branding and marketing.
[Steve is operating without slides...technical dificulties]
Which compiler is faster TurboXXX or QuickXXX. Obviously it is the one branded as Turbo, regardless of which one actually runs faster.
A brand is really just a pointer to a concept, a proper noun. Steve worked at Amazon for 10 years. Jeff Bezos worked hard to brand it as a book store. Even though it has done more than books for a long time now, the brand still means books to most folks.
National Biscuit Company is much less compelling than Nabisco. GTE's brand was in the toilet a few years back and went to a marketing company to improve the brand and were told it could be done over the course of a generation. They changed their name to Verizon instead of trying to build their brand name back up.
JavaScript has a branding problem. The name evokes emotions of problems with browsers. If there ever was a programming language that needed a new name it is JavaScript.
Open source licensing also has a branding problem. GPL is the clearest "brand" there, but feeling is not clear if that is the right license to use. Open source name is also a branding problem. Not a clear concept that comes to mind when thinking about open source.
Solutions...educate customers, send polite letters to the people using the term. What we really need is for open source to mean something, a narrow focus definition.
Posted by mike at July 26, 2007 10:01 AM
Hard Drive Recovery Group offers hard disk data recovery services for RAID, laptops and servers. Complete clean room and hard drive repair service.Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mike.kruckenberg.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1034
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Brand it: How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps:
» Ambien vs lunestra. from What is ambien.
Ambien sex. Ambien addiction. [Read More]
Tracked on December 14, 2007 2:38 PM