Open letter to Mandriva/Mandriva SA

[icycooler9]

Over the years, this community has provided a real form of "welfare" for you, to keep Mandriva alive. You would scream help, we would be there to save you, but you would just sit in the chair and watch us and try to find a way to faint again and let us do the work.Many here have gotten tired of "save the princess in the castle". All the other distros and companies are working their shifts hard and motivated. Mandriva is sitting here, watching with their cup of coffee, in a manner like "hey we are here to we should get paid", rather than employing good marketing techniques, and keeping good employees on staff that would help to keep this distro alive.

What have you repaid us with? More layoffs, contracts not having been renewed that should have been, and on and on it goes. Our present from Mandriva was a goodbye to Adam Williamson, a goodbye to wobo, a goodbye to good Mandriva developers, and a worry that you guys are going to die, and leave us with the work to be done.We understand that you have financial issues, but this is what this is about.

We love you guys, but you guys can't market.

Lets face it, Mandriva's financial situation has many worried. http://www.euronext.com/trader/summarizedmarket/stocks-2593-EN-FR0004159382.html?selectedMep=1 - your capital is fairly low, and considering your stock price in October 2007 was around .90 points, today it is at .21 with a loss of Adam and all the great people. Why are you guys doing so poorly?

For one, your marketing tactics are very weak. There seems very little motivation in this community. Most have given up on bringing this up because they tried hard before, but i haven't given up yet. Just to scratch the bare surface, compare these http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/powerpack/ http://www.apple.com/getamac/whymac/
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/904features/

Honestly, Mandriva's website needs to be redone again. The selling points on it are very weak. How is Mandriva's website going to convince users to buy Mandriva? There is no incentive at all. Including this http://www2.mandriva.com/mdvbackup/ there is no reason to use Mandriva, you just throw out raw information and expect users to jump up and down over it. Here is what your competitors have: http://www.carbonite.com/why_carbonite/ . Their homepage has people saying why they love carbonite at http://www.carbonite.com/.

At the Mandriva web site, Mandriva appears pretty weak in morale, both in looks, and in presentation (theme, the works). Looking at the Mac, and Fedora's beautiful installer and solar theme, even Ubuntu's café theme. But the thing is, they all help each other, because they unify the distro with the theme. Ubuntu's website resembles the desktop, so does Apple and Mac. Mandriva's wallpaper in 2009 spring was awful, a novice who doesn't know much about inkscape could easily redraw it. It is is a quickly drawn thing with a calligraphy pen with fake water lines, with a weird fish and a flower combined or whatever it is in the center of it. The La ora theme is aging, it was pretty somewhat in its day, but oxygen and gnome themes have exceeded it.

Themes may not be much in one sense for those who consider functionality over looks, but a unified theme brings motivation. Mandriva 2008 Spring was pretty with its wallpaper and la ora and kde3, all went nicely together, it was actually half way decent. But even then, the problem? It didn't tie with the mandriva.com website at all. Mandriva's website and marketing didn't flow at all with the theme. So it was a waste. It all comes down to the new users, and those who never used linux before, and are looking for a cheaper alternative.

I am not going to leave this in rant rant rant, because i want to suggest and help. Mandriva's future doesn't look bright, you are in a corner, there aren't many solutions left, since getting professional staff for changes can't be a option right now. I propose a full integration with the community.

For Mandriva's artwork and website motivation issue, that can be easily solved with a contest or promotion. Mandriva can hold a campaign of users submit their artwork or new proposed Mandriva website or sections of it for remodelling, and have the community and yourself vote on the best, and the winner of each category get a free Mandriva star bucket or whatever, with Mandriva flash, stickers, t-shirt, etc., and the stuff will be added to Mandriva releases and website. It could work, it will bring Mandriva closer to the community. WORK together with the community without the need of more staff, because we are here to help you.

For paid versions of Mandriva, there needs to be some feature that will make PWP the first choice. I will leave this up for open discussion for the comments below as this can be a long list and I'm not the community myself.

Mandriva needs to get employees close to this community. I know a few do, but we need more, make the company people feel like one of us, just like tilted mill runs theirs http://www.tiltedmill.com/forums/ and have open discussions with suggestions with general approval added if they seem logical. It seems the community right now is running separate from Mandy. Working together with us, Mandriva will have a lot of free staff on their hands.

Please Mandriva, listen to us. We are here for you, take our ideas and suggestions to heart, give us some motivation, and lets fight the operating system war.

[VenGanZa]

Panther hi mate

I endorse your comments whole-heartedly, and applaude your post. Especially since it is both insightful and researched.

My "sense" of the general feelings within the community tends to agree with your views. There are still a lot of people around who would be prepared to do a lot more to contribute if only Mandriva would wake up and smell the roses.

The company is in a very dire financial position, with no elbow room at all. To spurn whatever tangible benefits the community might afford them, is so abjectly irrational that it beggers belief.

I hope others give voice to the general insatisfaction with Mandriva's performance on the issues you mentioned, and others. Perhaps if we jump up and down enough they may listen before it is too late. You can only kick a dog so many times before it bites you.

I agree fully after looking at the promotion for competitors products, Mandriva's page is appalling by comparision. The whole website could do with a major upgrade.

It would sadden me to see Mandriva die or be in no position to counter-act some weak takeover. Let us hope they see the light and find some way to utilize all the good will that exists within the community (and I do not just mean this forum).

[muny]

I dont understand why mandriva is so cool with forum

dont talk about your post Panther86 (never mind about you), i dont read it (just two last posts titles).

Guys, what think about if i go to microsoft msdn just to says "why i switch to linux" with tons of words, sincerly ?

Why need to says "i go" ? just go.

[VenGanZa]

Muny I do not mean to be rude, English is not your native language, but I honestly am not able to understand what you are saying.

I presume you are speaking against Panther's post, perhaps you do not fully understand it. He is trying to voice the concerns many people on this forum have about Mandriva's need to interface more with the community for our mutual benefit.

If you are saying this forum is not the appropriate place for such postings, I disagree. This is not the Windoze world where censorship and spin-doctors abound, if you consider this "washing dirty laundry" in public, so be it. I prefer an environment where healthy criticism and argument can be aired in the open, besides, as I have come to understand, other more subtle approaches have not yielded results.

If you are going to reply, could you please try to make things clearer so I can understand. Thanks.

[Romain]

[aapgorilla]

IMHO the visual aspect of the website has improved greatly but I agree the selling points of powerpack are very weak:

some trial versions of software certified for Mandriva Linux in order to discover new tools;
very exciting: trialware (which!? will it expire and when, does it have limited functionability?)

a complete range of exclusive softwares that will be a big added-value to improve your Linux desktop;
which software, what does it do?

And then the banner below, it is æstheticly pleasing but you are trying to put forward an idea (in the memo), unfortunately it is in french but it might as well be gibberish to most of the world

[VenGanZa]

Romain

You are being overly harsh, the "empty bottle" analogy is not warranted, the tone of his post is not intrinsically negative, in fact his trust is to encourage better interface between Mandriva and the community.

I am not going to wax lyrical on the matter, I have not been here long enough to fully understand all the issues, but I do keep my ear to the ground, and there are many here who feel Mandriva has made some bad moves in various areas, perhaps you have heard it all before. I doubt it however, or you would not be quick to jump on what is in essence a plea for improvement.

I agree with you, everyone is free to contribute, help, suggest etc. Some of the older people around here perhaps feel it is a little too one-sided.

Time will tell, I hope I hope I am able to contribute more directly when I am able.

[Romain]

[tarakbumba]

Hi. I get your point Romain. I think you' re right about contributing. But i have to agree with Panther86 and aapgorilla about paid products representation. I might think about buying a Powerpack edition to support Mandriva Linux. But this isn't the correct way. Supporting the distro, if company wants that, made by donations. So if i want to buy a Powerpack, i should know about its benefits and website doesn't give me enough info why i should buy it. After 1,5 year Mandriva usage and translating it to my language (work a lot, translated thousands of strings as just one man) , i still don't know what benefits of Powerpack are... May be it's a shame for me but there should be more info for paid products.
_________________
Turkish translator |Admin at Mandriva Turkiye Forums| Mean what you say, say what you mean.

[jkerr82508]

I agree totally with Romain. It's easy to sit back and criticize. How many people have volunteered when Skiper has asked for help in re-organizing the Wiki? See this thread for example:
http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=110958&highlight=

Selling more Powerpacks won't save Mandriva (even though it might help at the margins) - if Red Hat and Novell (with all their resources) can't make a profit selling desktop OS's to individual purchasers, what chance has Mandriva?

The Mandriva community is a whole lot more than this Forum, if it were otherwise, Mandriva would have died long ago.

Jim

[pete morris]

I too dont get the point - other than the slightly trollish demeanor - Panther does have some checkered forum career, but that happens when your folks are multitasking O/S's!! Of course he might be garnering brownie points from mama.
I dont see it as a MDV problem only.
I have long held that KDE4 is going to trash the neighborhood.
It has - just like Vista did.
Even W7 couldnt keep our wandering troll happy for long.
Pete

[aapgorilla]

When Panther wrote a PCLOS review, got slammed for that and called a troll on the PCLOS forum, everyone believed he got treated unfairly, now when he tell his opinion on mdv's website we call him a troll (I can see the PCLOS people laughing from here)

[VenGanZa]

Let us not start jumping on Panther,

I think the point is can we, as part of the Mandriva community, come up with ideas and suggestions to make things better. This has to be a two-way street, Mandriva has to pitch in and offer ideas as to what the company perceives would be the best way to contribute.

Romain, no one is slinging mud in your direction, you have a tendency to polarize your replies at times, but I have noted often that you are open-minded and reasonable, and indeed you are right I am sure Mandriva has not been totally idle, given limited finances and the having to compete with jugganauts, making headway in the desktop Linux market is not easy by any means.

I do hope Panther's post does not degenerate into some pointless "talk-fest" punctuated by personality conflicts and pointless posts full of idle banter. I believe in essence, both Panther and Romain want Mandriva to improve, perceptions of what needs to be done and what is being done differ of course. We have the opportunity as Romain said to come up with some tangible, realistic ideas, so why don't we. If Mandriva is as Romain proclaims, open to input from the community, perhaps we shall be able to effect some improvement.

[aapgorilla]

Oops I just noticed MDVs front page changed to promote Click n Backup (good) but the linux distro now is no longer clearly visible (very bad), why no alternating (flash) banner or second banner below?

Content suggestion:
as mdv is not a very widely used OS, wouldnt it be better to market its availability for windows and osx more prominently?, eg not:
· integrated into Mandriva Linux
· available for other OSes

but:

· fully integrated into Mandriva Linux, Windows and OSX
· also available for other linux distros

[Romain]

[Romain]

[Romain]

[aapgorilla]

[pete morris]

Like I said - lose KDE4
Pete

[aapgorilla]

[aapgorilla]

[Francesco Triscari]

I don't know why but I find this thread a bit intimidating.....

I'll bite this bullet and I'll throw in my 2€/cent....

How about include wine in powerpack and make a big noise on the website about all the most popular software for windows that could be used in Mandriva?

Since W7 is coming out with a virtualization option (available only for the high end package-I think) to run XP applications why not to highlight on the website that Mandriva can do that too (virtualization)? a lot more space could be dedicate to VMware as not that many people coming from other non Linux OSs know what it is...

some documentation/(video)tutorials could be included with powerpack to encourage less skilled users.

another thing could be a free 6 months /10GB "click'n backup" offer for powerpack (which would certainly promote both products).

[VenGanZa]

Hi Romain

Of course a company like Mandriva cannot exist on donations, it is a reality however, that a large number of the people I have spoken to in this forum and in other places, see the only reason to purchase the PowerPack as contributing to Mandriva, which is in essence saying "The PowerPack offers me little, but I love Mandriva and want to help it survive". You can take a defensive stance if you wish, most people on this board seem to think there is a hell of a lot of veracity in that kind of statement.

Let us take the PowerPack as an example then, you are competing against companies with much greater userbases, more marketing oomph, and of course greater financial power. Anyone who looks as was suggested by Panther at the relevant web pages advertising Ubuntu, Mandriva etc will clearly see, if they have the barest notion of promotion that Mandriva's effort is somewhat lacking in detail and overall "salesmanship". It does not make me want to rush out and buy it. Coupled with this, as many people have pointed out, promoting a bunch of "trial/freeware" so prominantly was a big mistake, it cheapens the PowerPack immeasurably in many peoples eyes. If the inclusion of stuff like Adobe Reader was a mere afterthought, following on from all the wonderful offerings, in small type, well maybe. You can argue all you like about this, the fact is the majority of people here have spoken on this issue, and not only here, and the consensus seem to be, the "prominence" of these inclusions degrades the overall appeal. You wanted some concrete suggestions, well do not make the same mistake again. As an end-user, I love when I get more, but such things should be a mere footnote, not a selling feature, and that is the impression anyone who wanders on the page is likely to come away with.

Continuing on with the PowerPack, a whole lot of people have jumped up and down about "themes" personally I do not care less what theme is used, I change desktop to suit me straight away. I do note however it seems to spark a lot of debate, so perhaps it is very important to a lot of potential purchasers. One comment Panther made that struck me as both constructive and sensible on many levels, is for Mandriva to develep for the next release a very strong "theme" and have this reflected in web page design, company stationary, the whole nine yards. A unified design makes very good marketing sense. You say anyone is more than welcome to contribute designs.. great. I do tend to think however, the idea proposed by Panther for Mandriva to "invite" such inputs directly, either by some sort of competition or simply something on the web would tend to focus the mind a little more, plus widen the horizens a little. There are a lot of aspiring artists out there on the net, not all Mandriva users. A major campaign would not only result in a zillion new design ideas, it would garner a lot of interest in Mandriva, and isn't that worth looking at?
Let me give you an example of fantastic PR, a small island resort in Australia, advertised world wide, offering a position on the island, it was billed as the "best job in the world", well the promotion not only attracted enormous numbers of applicants, it attracted the interest of world wide TV, radio, web interest as well. You can imagine, you cannot get more bang for you buck, it cost them virtually nothing, and they reaped advertising that would have amounted to many tens of thousands of dollars.

I am very happy with 2009.1 and I know a lot of other people are, and just in case anyone is in any doubt, one of the last posters mentioned that the "community" is much bigger than this little board. Even so, there is a chorous of repetive complaints related to the PwP, Mandriva involvement and responsiveness I hear quite often. Romain I am sure you would agree where there is smoke there is fire, there is some substance to the plethora of voices which try and have tried to make things better. Anyone in a commercial environment who does not attend to the issues raised by customers is a fool, that is a very old adage. I fully agree with you, just because someone comes up with some idea, does not mean it is "actionable" naturally, provided any such well considered suggestions are actually looked at and evaluated, then great.

In general you seem to be saying the community should do more, but from what I understand from talking to a lot of the old hands, everything has been tried, more than once, and many seem to think Mandriva is just stuck in the mud and wont react to offers of help. I am new here, I do not understand the "politics" of it all, nor am I familiar with the problems of Mandriva several years ago, I was in gaol and thus had no information about anything. I do know this, and you do too, a whole lot of people who have stuck with Mandriva through good times and bad want it to improve, some of them have criticisms of one sort or another, not you nor anyone in Mandriva need to adopt a defensive stance, my take on things is that everyone who speaks up to comment on a shortcoming of Mandriva or its products, does so out of a desire to see things improve.

If we are going to persist in the thread, I would ask everyone, Romain, Panther, all of you, to refrain from personal tirades or irrational argument. Romain and Panther both seem to be wanting, albeit in different ways, for the community to generate ideas. Romain stated (quite rightly) that just because someone comes up with something, does not mean Mandriva will perforce adopt it, crystal clear and correct.

It seems it is down to you guys, I will help when I am able. The question is, how many of you have REAL concrete, realistic ideas to make Mandriva, the community, and all that jazz.... better?

[aapgorilla]

To be honest I believe PWP should be fased out completely and instead Flash shoud be promoted(maybe with the inclusion of some powerpack stuff like the codecs/dvd player). PWP might generate some sales but it also gives mandriva a bad name. I have seen so many angry people like this: http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=112290&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight= at least with Flash they have something tangable.

[wobo]

I read all this, holding back when I saw that the thread did not take the direction it was (maybe) originally meant.

Just defending yourself (Romain) by rebuffing Panther is as non-productive as you claim the original poster's post is. Despite what you wrote there have been some suggestions and ideas, especially in the marketing area which were read and forgotten (so it seems).

One of the main points in marketing is making the brand known, showing the brand as often as possible in any news site as possible. In other words: putting out to the world as often and as much as possible. In the MUGs forum we made suggestions how this could be accomplished. Unfortunately except 2 press releases there was nothing coming from Mandriva since the release of 2009 Spring. Meanwhile Ubuntu, Opensus, Fedora had their names in the news twice a week.
All that comes from Mandriva is very well hidden in blogs or wherever.

We suggested to re-establish the newsletter - nothing in this direction so far.

Regarding the web-discuss list. Apart from the fact that this is hard to follow (we discussed the mailing list vs forum long enough) it is also not really a list which encourages new people to contribute. That's my own opinion, based on personal experience.

Regarding the dialogue between Mandriva and the community: I know that you all are working hard. But to the community this does not show because there is no communication between Mandriva and the community. It even happens that there are dedicated questions which are not even replied to for months! Again, we discussed this in the MUGs area and suggested to take this topic to the cooker-menue - nothing has happened yet.

One thing is not opinion but a fact: communication between the community and Mandriva is at it's poorest stage as long as I have been with Mandrake/Mandriva, and you know that I've been with the big M almost from the start.

Looking back to the beginning of this year, you, Romain, are the only one from Mandriva who actually participated in discussions of this kind (apart from Germ as forum primate) - are you the only one at Mandriva who takes his time to talk to the community? It may not be so but to the average forum reader it just looks like it.

Please try to view the whole matter from the ouside and then judge Panther's post again.

wobo
_________________
I'm not bad. I'm worse.