Comments on: Marketing Open Source Software - Slides Online

By: Stephan Voigt

Stephan Voigt — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:38:56 +0000

Sandro,

I agree, during development English suffices, at least for us and English speaking people. During development time it’s like in an startup anyway.

By: ordnas

ordnas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:28:44 +0000

@Omid: I don’t host large files (the slides are 1MB) on my Web site because I want to avoid hitting the traffic limit. If you shoot me an email, I’d be happy to send the files to you: sandro at groganz dot com.

By: Omid

Omid — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:15:06 +0000

Hi Sandro

if possible put the slides here.
I have problem downloading from slideshare

By: ordnas

ordnas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:30:28 +0000

@Stephan: You are right. I just recommend to consider thoroughly whether a i18n Web site is really necessary. It depends on various factors.

For example, while your product is still in development, available as alpha or beta release, and you market to visionaries and early adopters, English suffices. If you are a system integrator providing in various regions, make sure you provide information in all the languages understood by your customers. Maybe your customers never look at your Web site, because they find you through word-of-mouth? Then an English-only Web site might suffice again and you only provide a few top-level pages in different languages. And so on…

By: ordnas

ordnas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:20:09 +0000

@Omid: It works for me. You’ll need to sign up for slideshare and need to be logged in. Below the slides, in the right corner, you’ll find the “Download file” link on this page: http://www.slideshare.net/ordnas/marketing-open-source-software

By: Omid

Omid — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:27:03 +0000

If possible put the slides here to be downloaded.
I have problems downloading from slideshare.

By: Stephan Voigt

Stephan Voigt — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:09:28 +0000

Hi Sandro,
Seems a good piece of work to me, worth the presentation to a bigger audience. There is just one point I’d like to discuss with you.
“Avoid multilingual corporate Web sites”
… is a good advice for startups and companies with local markets. If you do (or try to do) a worldwide business, multilingual websites is a must have. Even if it is a hard, expensive and time consuming task. If I imagine, how I could deal with a web site only available in Spanish of French, I would be completely out. This is still a world of different people and we should not exclude people due to the fact that we do blogging in English from Germany and get American readers. We still get just much less than half of the world.