What Open Source fails at

What Open Source fails at

Posted Feb 22, 2008 15:08 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: What Open Source fails at by jschrod
Parent article: Linux, we have a PR problem (ITnews)

But the Mozilla foundation does ads. They had full-page ads in US newspapers and magazines. And the effect in the USA is not that high - Firefox is more popular in Europe, where the Mozilla foundation didn't make that much advertising. It appears to be that Europeans don't need so much ads to be informed.

Generally speaking, the PR for a community based product should be word of mouth. The press would cover relevant technology by itself; the advertising effect of e.g the c't reporting about how bad IE6 is and how well for comparison Firefox, Safari, and Konqueror work, is worth more than a full-page ad. And when people generally ask their c't-reading geek friends what kind of software they should use, instead of trusting ads in non-geek papers, things would improve.

That's my rant against ads: If you think an advertisement contains information, you fool yourself. Our economy is highly efficient in producing goods, it is highly efficient in selling refrigerators even to Eskimos, but it is extremely inefficient in resources and in selling. The sales channel on many ordinary consumer goods is where the money is made - not the production. Resources are wasted by way too much goods being sold - more than needed, more expensive than necessary. To some extend this is actually necessary, because we can't deal with unemployment, and we need economic growth to pay interrests.

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