DoctorMo's Blog

I’ve just got home from a nice little Chinese/bar where I was unwinding and I got to chatting with someone and the conversation came to jobs and then to Ubuntu. I was attempting to explain that there are more choices than just Mac and Windows, but it seemed to just blow his mind that there could be anything more or better than windows xp or vista.

What we have in Ubuntu 9.04 and what we will have with Ubuntu 9.10 is more than good enough. It’s awesome and the general population who already use Ubuntu keep on telling us “why don’t more people know about this”. And that is also fustrating to them, they want to know where the problems are, and they assume Ubuntu has problems because no one knows about it yet.

The problem boiled down to advertising, no one I talk to has ever, ever seen so much as a sniff of tv, news paper, website, billboard or any other form of media marketing for Ubuntu. It makes the trust question very hard to answer and the only way people will listen is if you explain that it’s grass roots and not something used by huge businesses and millions and million of people all over the world.

We really need to start just getting the brand out there. Nothing spectacular. Just something that says “Ubuntu. For your Mac and IBM PC” and that it’s awesome. There isn’t a need right now to prove ourselves or over sell or use gimmicks, just getting the logo and the name in front of people and that it is a valid choice for computer use would be enough.

If we can’t have a corporate sponsor such as Canonical, IBM, Intel, Google, Linux Foundation paying for adverts, then perhaps it’s time we started doing something as a community. I’m not talking about the nascar 500 debarkle, but more of the firefox in the paper, full page spread kind of marketing. This kind of marketing would take real organisation though, lots of research and a lot of time to pull together all the people interested in making it happen. That’s probably why it’s not been done before.

Are there no community leaders interested in heading up marketing?