Plan-B for Software Documentation

Can 900,000+ users a week be wrong? It appears that nearly a million people download OpenOffice.org since the release of 2.3. Mark Herring, Senior Director, Marketing, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems Inc. reports in details about the uptick in weekly download triggered by the latest release and the publicity of the OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona.

While the numbers are impressive, I think Mark’s speculation of cost for a regular markerting campaign to reach the same results is excessive. I think it is safe to assume that the majority of extra downloads are upgrades by existing users. If this would be a commercial product, one would not need to buy millions of e-mail addresses to reach the existing users. In a traditional proprietary software model, users register their software and with that allow the company to inform them of new releases. So there is no cost of 10c per e-mail to reach the existing user base. And some proprietary products get their users to even download automatically what ever they throw at them. I see this comparison as a bit shaky.

… unless they can get it for free.

A marketing study at the Univeristy of Arizona asks the question what makes students pay for office suite software and are free open source alternatives like Open Office an alternative to pirated copies of the market leading MS Office?

The research looked at how much students would be willing to pay for a legal copy if the consequences woudl be the two choices. It turns out that $98 is the media price students were willing to pay to own a legal license. And that registration was a wee more effective than the publication that the software is not registered with every document that is produced and shared with others.

Interestingly, a group of students that was educated of the free open source alternative Open Office did not show less incline to pay for the MS Office suite. The researchers conclude that stability of the product and logevity of the maker are more important than the price to pay. Also an important factor is the convenience of using an application that is already familiar and does not come with the pain of re-training.

* The article cited mentions in the introduction: “Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share.” Benjamin Horst an Open Office dvocate from NY, pointed out in a discussion about this article that market share numbers are often misleading in the context of free software. Because, market sizes are measured in annual revenue spend for a particular product. However, free products do not generate any revenue, so the basis for comparison is off. By Horst’s estimation, Microsoft claims 400 Million Office installations, and OpenOffibe.org claims 100 Million. Ignoring the rest of the competition, he estimates a 20% market share for Open Office.

Last summer I went to the first BarCamp Boston. I had a great time there and did not want to miss BarCamp Boston 2 this past weekend.

BarCamp Boston 2 was held at MIT Stata Center, the famous building by architect Frank O. Gehry.

The rules for a BarCamp an unconference of geeks are simple. Every participant can chair a session, discussion or provide a lightning talk. The organizers have set aside a few appropriate meeting rooms and a schedule on a blackboard where one can read the program and add one self to the offering. In addition the organizers and sponsors did provide us with food and refreshments.

The first session I attended was “JavaScript Encryption” by Alan Taylor. Alan presented a self contained HTML document that included encrypted content which could only be revealed with the correct password. He calls his project Message Vault. His experience with making the application secure was very interesting. His biggest challenge was to embed an encrypted form of the password that was hard to decipher.

Next, I attended “Open/Collaborative/Green Mapping” by Jerrad Pierce. I had met Jerrad earlier in the hall where he presented his maps and had talked him into presenting his experience with this project in a session. He has created a Green Map of Cambridge, as part of the GreenMaps initiative. He also wrote his thesis on the subject of a better index to points on the map. Jerrad had 45+ interested listeners and a lot of questions where asked. How did he get the data from public sources? What tools did he use? What other tools he could recommend, especially those that where available at no cost?

Amanda Watlington presented before the afternoon break about “Video - How to Make It Found in Search Engines”. She stressed that video and audio files become more important to search as people use the web increasingly to consume media. So she told webmasters that it is important to annotate the media assets with internal and external keyword tags and to write, if possible, a transcript from the media and post it on a page that contains the file. In addition she recommended to submit the media file to specialty search engines, in order to make it available to the searching public.

My last session for the day was “Financing your Startup” by David Kaufman. It wasn’t all new, but certainly a comprehensive overview of how to finance your startup. I took away the following tidbits of wisdom: “Revenue or advanced financing by your (future) customers is the best way to survive the first phase” and “VC financing is only appropriate if you can show a very fast adoption curve and a large market.” Typically VCs want to invest X Millions and have that returned 10 fold within 3 to 5 years. If your business model does not show a plausible case for this kind of development, do not spend (waste) your time with talking to VCs. In addition, think about who the VC would potentially sell his share in the company? It helps to know who would be a potential buyer, especially as the default exit strategy of an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is not as available as it used to be.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the socializing in the evening, as I had prior commitments.

I just received a nice New Year’s surprise gift (I’m still struggling with writing ‘07 dates).

Michael Katz, a local e-newsletter marketing consultant, just published the recording of his audio seminar - “FINDING (AND USING) YOUR AUTHENTIC VOICE“. He usually sells his recordings, but decided to make it a free download this month.

Michael has a really authentic voice in e-newsletter marketing and he teaches his clients to be themselves in their writing. He has started a series of “Coffee with Michael“. This month he invited Lissa Bergin-Boles, a life coach from Toronto. I trust him to know something about this topic.

If you got 20 minutes and are interested in finding your authentic voice and using it in newsletters, articles or blogs, listen in.

Some folks at Mozilla had an idea to show their love for Mozilla Firefox, the free and open source web browser that keeps gaining market share.

They discussed the idea with others at OSCON06 and found collaborators in the Oregon State University Linux User Group. The idea was to create a crop circle for the Firefox logo.

The execution is awesome. Congratulations for showing creativity and stamina to make this beautiful work of art.

Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion and Matt McAlister comment today on screencasting with advertising. They refer to Infoworld’s new series of screencasts, where they now add an advertisement trailer.

Just in case, Infoworld intends to patent this one, I claim prior art since 2003.

See http://www.conficio.com/ (wayback machine)

I did not make this for money reasons nor did I use arbitrary ads. I simply used it to make the time required to load the screencast more entertaining and to benefit the sponsor (or buyer) of the screencast.

OpenOffice.org continues its line of competitive advertisements. The marketing project unveiled a new campaign that capitalizes on the market leader’s delays with its upcoming release Office 2007.

“Take a Test Drive - Keep the Car!” hints that you can test drive and keep OpenOffice.org for free. While Microsoft invited potential users for an online test drive of its beta 2 pre-release in which saving and printing is disabled, OpenOffice.org aims at customers to download the latest release 2.0.3 and install the full version. The catch, upcoming Office 2007 will pinch testers who like in the wallet once it is available. In contrast OpenOffice.org is free and open source.

In addition, Office 2007 will have many user interface changes which frightens many users because they have to relearn their skills. Another point of critic is that Microsoft does not support the new ISO 26300 office document standard and is still haggling with Adobe over the support of PDF files.

Tens days ago I held a talk about blogs and forums as business and marketing tools at the Network@TheLibrary in Winchester, MA. Today I discovered the “A-Z of Professional Blogging“, a list that answers many questions my audience had.

It includes from A like “AdSense” the Google advertisement program used by many bloggers to defray some of the costs, to “Zoudry” a blog editor, all you wanted to know about blogging.

Don’t be afraid, it is not only for professional bloggers. The list helps especially those that want to learn a bit more about blogging or have started already.

This morning I participated to my very first skypecast. Skyepcast is a new feature of Skype the VOIP company recently bought by EBay. A skypecast allows to give of live talk over the Internet, using VOIP. It also offers the possibility for listeners to to participate in a conversation.

I was a mere participant of a skypecast by PitoSalas about “BlogBridge:Library“. Pito faired quite well considering the glitches this beta product still has. I found out about the event through an announecment on Pito’s blog. I followed the link to a page on Skype’s website, where the basics of the event where listed.

When it was time to join the skypecast I clicked on a button on that page and my Skype was started. I got a bit confused, when the application asked me if I wanted to connect to an +99….. number via SkypeOut. I was not sure if this was a way to run up a hefty bill with Skype, but I figured my balance on SkypeOut was a mere few dollars and I could risk these.

A new window opened and in a few minutes half a dozen people had gathered. However, the host was still missing so we did not hear each other. Once Pito had logged on, we were all connected in a voice conference. This lead to lots of audio feedback and a very noisy environment. Thankfully, Pito as presenter was able to mute all microphones of the participants and so we could actually hear what he had to say.

Pito talked about their new product BlogBridge:Library (more…) and guided us through a demo on their website. Using voice broadcasting only, pito had to talk us through his demo. Adding Skype Instant Messaging (IM) capabilities helped to facilitate questions to the presenter. However, we didn’t manage to all be part of one IM session, so that the burden fell on the presenter to read many windows and post his link into all of them. I imagine this will become unmanageable when the number of participants exceeds 10 or 20.

A few minutes into the skypecast an new participant joined and rather loudly commented on what Pito was presenting. I guess she didn’t realize that we all could hear her. It appeared that the new participant came in at the default setting “open mike”, which was not intended by the presenter at this point in time. I guess this is a bug in the skypecast software.

In my experience, skypecast has to iron out some kinks in its beta version and give some better instructions and training how to use this new product. As medium skypecasting is quite limited compared to full fledged web-conferences, for example from BostonConferencing.com.

Ben Horst and a group of OpenOffice.org activists has started a fund raising campaign to raise awareness for the open source office suite Their plan is to place full page advertisements in New York’s Metro newspaper. The concept has been pioneered by the Spread Firefox campaign in 2005 when the open source community raised the substantial funds required to place a double page ad in the New York Times.

The Spread Firefox campaign raised awareness for the launch of Firefox 1.0. The campaign to place an ad in the NY Times became news in itself, because it seemed so outrages. The fund raising was so successful, that a double sided ad appeared in the NY Times with the names of thousands of donors.

Ben Horst, a long-time activist for OpenOffice.org takes it on him self to organize the effort. He set up a project at Fundable.org to raise $10,000 for two full page advertisements in NY Metro. New York’s Metro is a free newspaper that is distributed to 330,000 people every day and read by 450,000 readers. The goal of Ben’s efforts is to raise awareness that there is an easy to use, free and guaranteed legal alternative to high priced office productivity suites.

In addition to raising the funds, Ben Horst runs also a grassroots discussion group and a competition to design the full page advertisement. This is a real grass roots effort that should help to put OpenOffice.org in the minds of people outside of the geek community.

If you’d like to contribute, please hurry. Ben’s goal is to place the ads in the first week of July.