Re: Maybe we shouldn't spam the world with the 1.0 release announcement?

From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon May 06 2002 - 21:29:53 EDT

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    On Tue, 7 May 2002, Martin Sevior wrote:

    >
    >
    > On Mon, 6 May 2002, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
    >
    > > On lun, 2002-05-06 at 14:48, Jesper Skov wrote:
    > > > There's some truth to be found in Joel's text here:
    > > >
    > > > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html
    > > >
    > > > 80% of those reading the announcement with download AbiWord, find that
    > > > it doesn't have tables, and will never ever touch it again.
    > > >
    > > > I'm sure enough people, who are not judging a product by features they
    > > > don't use anyway, will find and start using AbiWord 1.0, even without
    > > > announcing it all over the place.
    > >
    > > I confirm that. I think I should agree with Jskov. Wait for 1.2 with
    > > Table and other stuff to announce our product to the world.
    > >
    > > Announcing 1.0.1 on SF, freshmeat and other free-software oriented is
    > > fine. Upload them to major software archives (even for Windows) is.
    > >
    >
    > Hmm the original motivation for making a big noise at the 1.0 feature set
    > point was to increase our user base by at least an order of magnitude.
    > We're pretty well known in the Linux landscape but almost totally unknown
    > to the Windows user base. We could certainly use more Windows developers.
    >
    > I'll read that article however and hold off on the spam until there is
    > concensus.
    >

    OK I read the article. I can see we'll be beaten about the head for not
    providing tables. However we do provide a theasurus, whih Open Office
    doesn't. We can do spellchecking in 30 languages simultaneous, which Open
    Office doesn't. We have many usability edges over Open Office - like
    modeless dialogs.

    We are tons smaller than openoffice and we do run on XDarwin which open
    Office doesn't.

    I think we have enough feature points in our favour to do a major
    announcement.

    In addition with 1.0.2 we will have integration with evolution.
    which is very rapidly becoming the unix email client of choice.

    It is really cool the way this works. Install rpm with *.oaf file - word
    processing docs appear in evolution.

    So big announcement of 1.0.1 now follow up in a couple of weeks with 1.0.2
    with evolution integration.

    Makes a nice 1 - 2 strategy.

    OK, I'm clearly a humble amauter on Marketing. Could Paul or Eric provide
    some advice?

    Thanks!

    Martin

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