[ocaml-biz] target demographics

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Olivier Grisel wrote:
>
> I don't think being "too friendly" is a disadvantage
> especially for an open source project.

I don't think OCaml should be viewed as "an open source project."  I
think it should be viewed as "a language competing in the commercial
arena with all the other languages, like Java and C#."  Thus it needs a
logo that the CEO of some Fortune 500 company isn't gonna laugh at.

By way of example, Red Hat has a good, slick, commercial identity for
their Linux offerings.
http://www.redhat.com/  I find no fault with their branding.  They
certainly didn't decide, once upon a time, "Oh, we're just in it for
open source, we only have to appeal to the open source crowd."  They
were in it to make money, be successful, and gain marketshare.  *While*
advancing the goals of open source.  And they did so.

> Look at Tux the penguin for instance: its
> friendliness doesn't prevent Linux to be a leading competitor
> on the OS market.

Who do you think got the Linux marketing job done?  Tux or Redhat?
Actually, I'm not fully conversant with the history of Linux marketing,
as I dropped out of the Linux world in 1996.  If anyone remembers the
history of what paved the way, we'd welcome the comments.  My impression
is that *much* is owed to Redhat.

When doing a similar effort for Python, we identified 3 demographics
that matter for getting a language adopted:

- techies
- suits
- educators

Those are 3 different language adoption strategies.  The 'educator'
strategy is to get the stuff to be popular in academia, to get it taught
in courses.  Then all the undergrads go into industry, and poison the
industry with whatever they've learned in school.  Because of where
Python is at today, we didn't think that was the most important
strategy.  We chose the 'suit' strategy, which is making a presentation
to a Dilbert that seems to say, "I can do anything your Java or C# can,
only better."  Techie marketing is like cute penguins and stuff.  "I'm a
geek, give me geek stuff."  The problem with geek stuff is that suits
don't like it, and educators may not take it seriously.  We figured, no
techie would reject Python because it had a 'suit' logo; but plenty of
suits would reject Python if it had a 'techie' logo.  And so we designed
a suit-friendly logo, to cover as much as we could.

Again, I don't think suits want to hear about 'friendly' or 'cuddly'.
They want to hear about 'serious' or 'respectable'.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.