OpenOffice.org Newspaper Ad Mockup Released
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 26, 2006 08:22 PM
from the spread-the-word dept.
from the spread-the-word dept.
Benjamin Horst writes "The volunteer effort raising $10,000 to place at least two backpage ads in New York City's free daily paper Metro is now entering its second full week. We've collected over 10% of our goal already and continue to find new pledge donors at a healthy pace. Our project's purpose is to help 'cross the chasm' and bring awareness of OpenOffice.org 2.0 to the large number of computer users who stand to benefit from its broad feature set and range of useful capabilities. This is not the first time an open source project has sought a high-profile newspaper ad buy. In fact, our effort was directly inspired by the Firefox New York Times ad. Firefox's famous effort announcing its arrival on the world stage helped push it from about 10 million downloads to its current tally of over 185 million!"
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Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
My 0.02$.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again they need to improve their product more before they launch it. Making it less bloated than Microsoft Office is a good goal. I mean...come on? Slower than Office? How is that possible?
Re:Is it (Score:5, Funny)
http://java.sun.com/ [sun.com]
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting a student or two at an art school to make a top notch advert worthy of a back page ad on a newspaper is really stinking easy.. Most students kill for something to put on their resume and having it published is even a bigger bonus to get the students signing up.
The Mock-up is worse than some of the low refinance rates flash ad's all over the net (Gawd that moster playing a love song one sucks worse than most flash animations on albinoblacksheep.com)
If they want to do this they nered to first get a national newspaper class add created. Not that hard and will cost nothing if they apprioach it right. THEN go asking for money.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Funny)
Getting a student or two at an art school to make a top notch advert worthy of a back page ad on a newspaper is really stinking easy..
Given that the credits read "Design by ..." I suspect this is exactly what they're going to do. They could have made it a bit more obvious, though.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
If a badly designed ad (with bad humor) ends up in any newspaper, it will make sure that a lot of people will NOT get the product. They will just think of the Mt. Rushmore and the horrible tagline ("They'd download it").
No marketing is infinitely better than bad marketing!
Re:Is it (Score:5, Funny)
All that ad needs is a few gradients, 1pt boxes around all the text, and some drop-shadows, and it's ready to go!
ew (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Informative)
From the fine web page;
I don't know, it kind of looks like something you would see in a newspaper but if you can do better - let them know [google.com] about it!
Re:Is it (Score:4, Insightful)
- A screenshot of the UI.
- Emphasis on it being a free (in price, since businesses care about that more) Office suite that can import/export MS Office files.
- Emphasis on it being able to completely replace MS Office.
- A "download it for free from" and then a URL.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
* Performance metrics V MS Office (Even more so in the PPC Mac version!)
* Comparison of Clipart and Wordart features (My kids won't use OOo cos it has none)
* Cost/Benefit in switching from a version of Office that people/companies already own
As far as I can see, the difference between Firefox and OOo is that FF was a distinctly superior product, that filled a gap left by the poor features, security and function of IE. OOo on the other hand fills the same niche as MS Office, but is free. Both of them are massive bloated feature rich monsters, that 95% of people use about 5% of.
Sure, if you don't have any kind of Office software you might try OOo before forking for Office, but if you already own a copy of Office, the time taken to learn new menus and workflow isn't worth switching. Likewise if you are just gonna pirate Office then it's easier to get what you'll be using at work or school than learn something new.
Corporate environments ditto, retraining office drones to accept that a function is in a different spot, rolling out new software etc, isn't worth the time cost of switching from the Office 2000 install that was paid for once and has served well for 5 years. Likewise if you have MS licensing, it's probably all bundled with your OS licensing anyway. This may be different when the next version of Office comes out though, for orgs that will be upgrading at that point the tabbed menu structure in the new Office will mean drone retraining anyway.
I'm not pro MS by any stretch, but I have to work with it. These are arguments compiled from my attempts to live on OpenOffice alone, and from family and friends who I have tried to convince to switch. FF gave easily understood advantages, in security, functionality, but the motive to change Office suite just isn't as compelling
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but the claims in the ad are dubious and subjective at best, if not outright untrue. For a start, I'd be expecting a call from Microsoft's legal team, followed by several others, over the claim to be the "world's best" at all those things.
If they run that ad, then unfortunately I think it will have only one overwhelming effect: it will convince serious businesspeople everywhere that open source software is from amateurish wannabe land, and shouldn't be touched with a bargepole.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the free throwaway 10 pager they pass out by the subways. The articles are sub-par, even for a free fishwrap. This won't have an impact on a literate, decision making crowd.
If they want to foster adoption, take out a quarter pager in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. People who have the clout to have their companies adopt a new and better office platform read those.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Insightful)
People forget a lot about FireFox. For one, everyone, 10 years ago, was using Netscape... which begat Mozilla... which begat FireFox.
People are comparing this to FireFox, because FireFox has a lot of support. People view FireFox as an open source victory. There's a lot different about FireFox though. For one, it was competing against IE, which wasn't as feature-rich and didn't work as well (sorry MS). Compare to MS Office, which OO.O actually has a tough time competing against (Yes, let the flamewar begin. There's nothing like 1000 posts saying, "but I don't use those features!").
Anyway, by the time FireFox was dumping out newspaper ads, IT pros were already recommending their users install it rather than IE, and people were listening. I don't think that that is remotely true of OO.O.
Also, the ad isn't going to resonate with anybody. 99.95% of the population doesn't believe that all software needs to be free, and certainly even less understand what that means, since most people who discuss the matter and clamor to the call don't actually understand what it means.
The ad just isn't going to work on the general public, and it's too soon, there isn't the grassroots support for it. They should wait a year or two until they have their own head of steam, and don't have to ride FireFox's coattails.
Is it just me... (Score:4, Funny)
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont have anything against openoffice.. but comparing openoffice with Microsoft-office.. it still has looong way to go (you are free to disagree).. where as firefox beats Internet-Explorer quite easily.
Indeed. I convinced my project to use OpenOffice. I did this purely to satisfy my anti-Microsoft ideology. I convinced the others via cost and demonstrating how well it handled Office files. Two months later, 2/3 of the people were complaining about how bad it was, and the rest were admitting that it wasn't so good. 1/3 of the people had installed Office, knowing that the rest of us would still be able to handle their files. The rest of us continue to use openoffice because of ideology, apathy, or laziness.
Basically, only the spreadsheet has worked to our satisfaction. Text documents are passable, but unpleasant. Presentations are completely inadequate. The migration to Office was mainly triggered by the need for PowerPoint.
I still tell people about OpenOffice, and that we (mostly) use it for our project. But I only recommend it to people who have to do simple things, like short reports or billable hours.
On the other hand, all of us independently decided to use Firefox. And nobody except me realized that there were all those extensions and themes---they chose it because it just worked better "out of the box".
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as you try to stay compatible with MS Office, you _will_ get screwed. The easiest way to get around that would have been to say "We don't care, we are going to use ODF, and MS Office users can become compatible with us." Then let _them_ worry about compatibility issues.
Not really... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that and actually run the ad in a subscriber-based newsparer, such as the Times, instead of a free rag.
Seriously, that ad is going to attract noone.
Re:What's missing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Importing to OO fixed it, but messed up the colours slightly. It was still usable though.
I heard about it when they started cursing Microsoft... These aren't the people I would normally have expected to know what OO was and definately not the standard slashdot types.. but they all (well, a group of 5 of them) switched to it because Office let them down at a crucial moment.
Of course this is a place where backward compatibility doesn't really matter - documents are produced for the moment, so ODF is fine.
Ugh. (Score:5, Interesting)
the ad looks like crap (Score:5, Insightful)
That looks like something put together in MS Paint. It really is a crap advert and does nothing for OpenOffice.org.
If you are going to spend a lot of money putting an advert in a paper at least make it worth your while and get a decent advert designed.
Re:the ad looks like crap (Score:5, Funny)
Don't hit. Don't hit.
Ad is missing important points... (Score:5, Insightful)
- doesn't mention that it can run Linux and other O/S (I know Windows and Mac users are the target audience here, but the wide platform availability is one reason why I switched personally...)
- "Free Software for Free People" => doesn't quite work. It is not explicitly said that OO.org can be downloaded and installed for zero financial cost, but instead alludes that OO.org is "free" in the same sense that people are "free". A person can not cost anything (unless you are a slave), so... the ad draft doesn't communicate the important point of "free to download, free to install, free to use"
- don't even get me started on the bright yellow background. I know its a rough draft, but at least make it a *good* rough draft! If I saw something that cheezy/annoying/distracting/unprofessional in my newspaper, I would turn to the next page before I finished reading the title
Good intentions are there, but I need more faith in an ad that works if I'm going to shell out cash for this cause. I don't want to waste my donation money on an ad that doesn't advertise very well
Re:Ad is missing important points... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe in Soviet Russia it can.
Ugh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I like OO and all (Especially when my $2500 computer came with a trial version of Office.......) but could they find one capable designer to donate 30 minutes of their time somewhere--anywhere in the project?
I might support a real ad in a real publication, but paying good money to distribute this visual hernia in the back of a disposable rag isn't going to bring credibility to anyone.
Ach, mein eyes (Score:5, Insightful)
Joe SixPack wont get it (Score:5, Insightful)
For years security experts and geeks have been telling users to "be very careful with free software" to avoid malware and other nasty junk, and this ad quite frankly looks like some of the armature SPAM I have received in my inbox, if I saw an ad for this it doesn't make me want to download it or trust where it is coming from.
For 10K I would take a different approach, the best advertising is word of mouth so I would do something like Mac did in the early 90's, fund schools with software/hardware and a learning program for the software, if it impresses schools then more schools will happily adopt it, plus each kid could be given a free copy to take home to practice on.
10K could do one classroom in one school, but the word of mouth and the publicity from a company trying to help education would be priceless.
Who reads Metro? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't that $10,000 be better spent on banner ads on high traffic site or Google adwords? Then they'd reach a worldwide audience, and the reader would be literally seconds away from downloading the suite for themselves.
They're not ready yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
I do use OpenOffice on a daily basis, and I love it. However, it's still dog-slow and clunky in some parts, unfinished or unpolished in others, and buggy here and there. You have to get to know its individual quirks. I tried getting my Microsoft Office-loyal boss to use it for a while, and he gave it up pretty fast. He found a number of things that he was used to doing in Excel that he couldn't do in OOo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the project or the efforts of its contributors, nor can I stand up and say that I've contributed code or money to it. What I am saying is, they haven't reached the level of completeness that Firefox had reached before the Firefox ad came out. Couple that with a typically glacial development and release process, and you'll get hordes of new users checking it out
And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.
Marketing 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
Version 2 by pro designers (Score:5, Insightful)
Much better would be for this discussion to focus on the real issue of the fundraising effort. Thinking about the target market, the choice of NYC as the location, questions about the number of daily readers of this paper (450,000, in fact), thoughts around the Tipping Point concept of Malcolm Gladwell, reaching a new crowd of non-geeks and home/small business users, etc. These are the valuable points we should be talking about! Not the draft, mockup ad that will soon be superceded.
"Free" is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the ad is fugly... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just a draft, and we are in search of your feedback and suggestions!
I can only assume the ad will be replaced with something a lot, LOT better. Maybe it would be a good idea to get that part straight before soliciting for cash?
I'd like to see:
* What OOo is.
* Why you would use it.
* Compatibility with MS Office
* Compatibility with WordPerfect (?)
* Save-to-PDF and other standout features
* Who brought you this ad, and why they did it.
* NeoOffice as an interoperable alternative for OS X.
Whoa. That was triangular.
All the above could be done in a really clever way. A cool graphic. A slogan. Something that grabs your attention and then makes you read more. A contest or something might help to facilitate the best idea(s) floating to the top.
W
Does this ad suck by design (Score:5, Insightful)
OOOOOOOOHHHHH SHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTTTT!
and they smash this traffic accident of a design together in the hopes that everyone is so horrified that someone with some brains and aesthetic sense gives them something better to use
. . . seriously, this ad is the perfect example of what is wrong with OpenOffice in comparison to Firefox:
1. OpenOffice is not as good as the commercial software it's trying to compete with, and so it is sort of hard to come up with a marketing-type message.
2. The software itself, while functional, lacks any sort of cohesive vision or raison d'etre beyond "hey, what do you want? It's free"
3. It looks like crap. I know this is hard for many of you programmers out there to hear, but if your application *looks* like crap, people are going to think it *is* crap, no matter how good it actually is.
4. Whereas Firefox took their message to the New York Times and built-up a lot of well justified hype, the OpenOffice folks came up with something that looks like a cross between a church picnic flyer and a political manifesto that maybe a dozen clueful people will read and understand.
Re:Design (Score:5, Insightful)
What is probably the worst thing of all is that Open Office is both slower and less stable than Microsoft Office. Really I'm not quite sure why anyone would switch other than price. If they advertise themselves now when the product is less than ready for full time, they risk leaving the public in general with the impression that Open Office is inferior to Microsoft Office and always will be. Whereas if they waited until the product was superior to office they would have a better chance at making/keeping converts.
That's being unfair to things that ARE horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just basic stuff, like the absurd hyphenation of "all-in-one" in that context... it screams "high school marketing project," and conveys the sense that the technology effort might not be any more fully executed.
Combine that with the low-brow attempt to appeal to some reflexively counter-culture audience, and the tone is just plain wrong. The project doesn't need more hipster nerds using the software, it needs more corporate IT people to like it. And those folks are not going to talk their bosses and users into using it on the grounds that doing so makes a political statement or somehow "gets even" with profit-oriented companies. Come on! It's profitable companies you want to attract, and conveying that whole "business is teh evil" atmosphere will do more to alienate prospective users than pretty much anything else.
And, of course, never mind that Excel can still kick its ass, which makes the "world's best" claim just transparently false... and isn't that sort of hucksterism the very thing that the F/OSS most hate about software from The Man?
Better to have a contest with marketing/design students - they've got a vested interest in building up their portfolios and can really use "won contest" on their resume. And, they may actually have a clue about how punctuation, capitalization, clauses, verbs, and those other little details play a role in communication.
Re:Design (Score:4, Insightful)
Based only on that ad I'd assume that OpenOffice some bush-league office suite that I'd find in the schlocky productivity aisle in the software section of BestBuy or Wal*Mart, alongside the "AdSubtract" and "InternetWasher" crap.
Re:Design (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Design (Score:4, Interesting)
Ya know, Doc Searls of the Linux Journal once said that "open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself." That's quite true, IMHO.
This is a total grassroots effort. Neither Sun Microsystems nor IBM nor Novell or anyone else has "officially" given a dime so far to this OOo ad campaign. YOU own this ad campaign, just like YOU own OOo and every other Free Open Source Software project.
I'm sure you've heard this joke. Microsoft says, "Where do you want to go today?" Apple says, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FOSS says, "Are you coming, or what?"
So, what are you going to do? Just sit back and complain? Or do something positive and help with this ad campaign?
Re:They'd download it (Score:5, Funny)
OK, show of hands: who would trust proofreading done by this person?
Re:They'd download it (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They'd download it (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Do it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Do it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The only way (Score:4, Insightful)