One of the great things about Open Source software, is its ability to significantly cut the length and expense of the sales process, by allowing prospects to “self-qualify” themselves for the product offering. Simply put, because an Open Source software product is freely available for download, potential users can get it, try it out, and decide for themselves whether it works for them. If it does, they can then decide to approach the vendor for additional services or technical support.

From the Open Source vendor’s perspective, this is a great place to be, because it’s getting a constant stream of leads which are (a) already educated about the product and (b) interested in pursuing a commercial relationship. This makes things much easier for the vendor’s sales people, because they typically need to do far less work in convincing the prospect of the suitability of the product and they can instead focus on meeting specific requirements and closing the deal. In summary, a shorter sales cycle for the vendor and clearer expectations/less disappointment for the customer.

Understand the Buying Process (and the Buyer)

The trick to this, of course, is to ensure that prospects have enough information to self-qualify. And this is not simply a matter of “provide a download link and they will do the rest”. For an Open Source vendor to fully exploit the informational advantages of Open Source, it needs to make sure that potential customers have all the information they need to satisfy their questions and concerns independently. And so, it is necessary to prepare and make available different types of marketing collateral for each stage of the buyer decision process.

There are two important aspects to consider here.

1. The stage of the buying process

The typical buying process consists of need identification, research, evaluation of alternatives, purchase and post-purchase evaluation. These stages are performed sequentially, and the prospect’s information requirements change from one stage to another.

For example, in the first and second phases, the prospect may have a wide range of options, but as the evaluation progresses, the field is whittled down to a few likely candidates. Correspondingly, the granularity of detail required also increases: for example, in the first two stages, the prospect may only be interested in (say) the platform and integration requirements, but once the main candidates are identified, the prospect will examine each in detail to understand the relative benefits of each. This is clearly seen in the following simple diagram.

2. The status of the buyer

The status of the buyer must also be considered. In small firms, the economic buyer (the one who actually pays for the product) and the decision maker (the one who takes a final purchase decision) might be one and the same. However, in larger organizations, the decision maker might be a developer, while the economic buyer might be a business manager or CFO. The information provided must be correctly targeted to the buyer’s status within the organization.

For example, consider the evaluation stage. At this point, a developer is keenly interested in the technical benefits of the product and so would gain maximum value from technical white papers, sample code, technical presentations, and other collateral that illustrate the technical capabilities of the product. However, a business manager at the same stage of the process would like to read case studies of similar deployments, white papers about collaboration features, data sheets listing service and support options, and so on.

Marketing Collateral Cheat Sheet

Here’s a quick cheat sheet, based on my experience, of what you could provide to different types of prospects to help them at each stage of the buying process:

A final question to consider: how do you actually make all this material available to prospects? The best way is through your Web site, as this offers several advantages:

• It’s the first place a prospect will visit for more information on your product/service offering.
• It’s publicly accessible, which means that sales people (yours and your partners’) can use the same collateral for direct sales.
• It’s central and 100% under your control, which ensures that updates occur in a single place and you don’t have to worry about salespeople or partners working off outdated material.

Conclusion

Open Source offers a number of advantages, and these are not restricted only to the software aspects of your product or service. By making available as much information as possible, you’re allowing potential customers to validate your offering against their needs, and giving them the tools to make an informed decision. This allows them to self-qualify or self-disqualify themselves, serving as an automatic filter and granting you the benefits of a shorter and more effective sales cycle.

All too often, companies think of branding as a one-time effort: they define the market positioning, create a brand and logo to reflect this positioning, and then take this brand into the world. All marketing activities that follow from this – advertising, public relations, promotions, customer communication – are based upon the defined brand identity. The truth is that brands develop over time and while they mature, the messaging needs to be revised.

Brands Reflect Perceptions (and Vice-Versa)

A brand is special, because it is an identity constructed in our minds and it creates an emotional as well psychological connection between the company and its customers. Each customer is likely to interpret the same brand in a subtly different manner. Thus, a brand isn’t a “one size fits all” representation of a company; rather, it is the composite of multiple individual perceptions and emotions. As Daryl Travis, in his book Emotional Marketing, notes “…a brand isn’t a brand to you until it develops an emotional connection with you.”

What many companies forget is that a brand is a living entity. Just as a brand shapes customers perceptions, it too is shaped by perceptions – both of its customers and of its staff. And as a company learns more about itself over time, as it begins to look at itself from different perspectives, its brand too must evolve and reflect this additional knowledge and intelligence.

A Few Examples

If you take a look at some software brands, you’ll clearly see this evolutionary process taking place. Here are some examples:

• Apple‘s original logo (pre-1976) depicted Sir Isaac Newton under an apple tree. However, this was soon replaced with the famous “bitten apple” silhouette, which had cleaner lines…perhaps intended to highlight’s Apple’s clean, smooth designs. Initially filled with rainbow colors, the logo has evolved into a monochrome design – first black and then the current transparent/glass version. In short, as Apple’s unique design culture has emerged and as customers have also begun to recognize (and expect) cutting-edge design from Apple, the brand has evolved to match and reflect these expectations.
• Another interesting example is SugarCRM which, back in 2004, had a tagline describing it as “commercial open source customer relationship management”. However, as time has passed and the CRM category has become well established, the company has dropped this explanatory tagline from its brand identity. The cube-shaped logo is a relatively recent addition, and perhaps is intended to represent how its product brings together different facets of information to create profiles of customer relationships.

The Evolution of Identity

A brand’s identity typically goes through the following phases, which usually manifest in the taglines you find in Website headers or advertising slogans:

1. A young brand needs to be explained, thus a category-style tagline is chosen (just like SugarCRM did in its early days, see above).
2. The brand has established itself in its category, the company has a strong identity and changes its tagline to an emotional one (think Apple’s “Think Different” slogan).
3. The brand is the leader in its category and has a high visibility, the tagline is abandoned because the brand now speaks for itself (Apple or Amazon.com nowadays).

An analogy would be to compare brands with human beings. For example, when introducing yourself, you tell the other person your name, why you are there and perhaps what you do – just like in the first phase of a young brand. The better someone knows you, the more they will be able to decide how they want to relate to you and whether to enter a (private/business) relationship. The deeper the relationship, the more important emotions become. Once you and a related group know someone really well, you won’t have to explain to the group who e.g. “Marc” is, because they know him, thus the personal brand speaks for itself.

Given that brands are constructed in our minds, this analogy is actually quite powerful, because we are social beings and the way our mind works when it relates to something is greatly influenced by how we build relationships with other human beings.

Conclusion

What does this mean for you, the Open Source vendor? Simply this: as your product and your market evolves, you need to occasionally step back to refine and focus your brand strategy. In most cases, any changes you end up making to your brand strategy will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, reflecting the changes in knowledge and perception that have accrued to the company over the preceding period. Doing this every two to three years will help ensure that your brand is relevant and in tune with the needs, expectations and perceptions of your customers and yourself. Essentially, your brand will go through different phases of its identity, just like a human being does as it grows older.

Today, more and more proprietary software vendors are choosing to go Open Source. Doing this enables them to leverage the community benefits of Open Source, shorten the sales cycle, and gain a competitive advantage over other proprietary products.

However, for those firms considering a switch to Open Source, there are some hard decisions to make with regard to their product architecture. Should they provide only a single Open Source product, and earn revenue from add-on services like support and consulting (RedHat)? Or should they adopt the Open Core model, offering their product under both Open Source and proprietary licenses (MySQL)? Or perhaps some hybrid of these two approaches?

In this post, I’ll consider two common architectures, which I’ll respectively call the “Open Core” and “Solutions” architectures.

Open Core Architecture

The term Open Core is used to describe business models where vendors offer both an Open Source “community edition” and a more fully featured, commercially licensed “enterprise edition”. MySQL is undoubtedly the most common example of this model, although it’s widely in use among other firms as well.

Typically, the enterprise edition product comes with vendor guarantees and support, thereby making it more attractive to larger enterprises. At the same time, it ensures that smaller firms and individuals, who may not require these attributes, are not excluded, as they can freely access and use the community edition of the product, albeit without any guarantees.

Solutions Architecture

Under the Solutions Architecture, a vendor offers separate packages or distributions of the same Open Source product, identified in terms of the functionality they add. Thus, rather than an “enterprise edition” and a “community edition”, the vendor might provide specialized offerings for different skill sets such as a “developer edition”, “database administrator edition”, “project manager edition”, and so on.

Typically, each solution comes with vendor guarantees and all the distributions are based on the same Open Source code base. This ensures interoperability and peace of mind. At the same time, this approach is economical for end-users, as they only pay for the product features that they need, and so it allows both individuals and large enterprises to participate in the product ecosystem.

Which is Better?

Given these two options, which should a firm choose? Here are some arguments to consider:

• Under the “Open Core” architecture, the vendor’s community edition may be perceived as “crippleware” lacking the more advanced features found in the enterprise edition. Users may accuse it of cynically providing a functionally limited Open Source version merely to drive sales of its commercial version. This can lead to a negative impression of the vendor, and may adversely affect its market positioning.
• At the same time, by using Open Core terminology such as “community edition” and “professional edition”, the vendor might be seen as implicitly categorizing some users as “non-professional”. Where these users are also contributing to the community, this will naturally cause friction and conflict. The Solutions Architecture, by contrast, makes no such claims and is less likely to produce an “us versus them” mindset.
• In a fragmented, highly competitive market, a vendor faces competition from multiple niche products, both proprietary and Open Source. In this situation, the Solutions approach allows the vendor to compete effectively against these specialist products, as each distribution is narrowly positioned to attract a distinct market segment.
• On the other hand, the Open Core approach is an easy sell to the enterprise market. The typical enterprise edition product will include technical support, warranties, SLAs and compatibility guarantees, all of which are critical to medium- and large-size enterprises. In general, it is also easier for a direct sales force to sell a single enterprise-focused product rather than a distribution-based product line.
• The Open Core model is already successfully in use by many firms. It therefore has the benefit of pre-existing market awareness and acceptance, and it is easy for customers to understand its nomenclature and business benefits. This simplifies the sales process, as there is less customer and salesperson education required.

Conclusion

As the above arguments make clear, there aren’t any hard and fast rules about which product architecture is “the best”. However, it’s possible to identify arguments for and against each approach, and thereby decide which one will be best suited to the firm’s specific goals and requirements. Needless to say, the final decision will have a far-reaching impact on the firm’s business model, competitive positioning and marketing strategy…and so, it should be taken after due consideration of all the relevant factors.

2008 was an exciting and very successful year.

I officially started my own business in February: InitMarketing, the open source marketing company. Ever since then, the InitMarketing customer base keeps growing. As of today, there are 15 paying customers including open source software vendors and associations, ranging from content management systems, e-shops to Linux distributions, from mega corporations to small start-ups. Some of them are in the FOSS business for several years, others recently started or even open sourced their formerly proprietary product. InitMarketing helped them with marketing strategy definition, community building, public relations, blog coaching, event management, creating product brochures, writing case studies and white papers and much more.

Revenues for 2008 clearly exceeded my expectations. We have been contracted for project-specific work as well as on a retainer basis. A good part of that money went to InitMarketing’s team members who have done an excellent job helping out with their special expertise on customer projects.

I am particularly proud of InitMarketing.tv, because it is first of all a lot of fun to record the video interviews about Open Source marketing. Second, the videos provide real value to those who watch them much in the spirit of Open Source communites where expertise is being shared happily. Furthermore, video recording and editing has turned into a passion and I very much enjoy extending my prosumer skills.

The goals for InitMarketing in 2009 are to double our revenues, but given the world-wide economic downturn, I am clueless if we can make it. Honestly, I wish that those claims about Open Source software doing better during a recession turn out to be true. So far, I don’t have any reasons to not believe that this self-fullilling prophecy will fullfill itself.

There are positive signs: none of our customers face any economic problems yet. Some of them even performed better than projected during the second half of 2008 … but – you know – only the paranoid survive.

Given the overall economic climate and the general bad financial situation of the U.S., I don’t want to be overly optimistic. Nevertheless, the advantages of open source software over proprietary software in times of tight budgets are obvious. The only real problem are completely cut-down budgets…

Anyway, I wish you all a 2009 that can only become better than expected, right?

It’s been quiet for a month on my Weblog due to still increasing demand for the services offered by InitMarketing. The more I am happy to be able to present some of the work we are doing for our clients.

In June, we started to work with YMC on what we labeled “marketing phase 1″. This project set out to build a completely new corporate design and identity. We re-defined the positioning and branding of YMC, re-launched their corporate website regarding visual appearance and content, created marketing collaterals and more.

About YMC

YMC is located in Switzerland. Their software is what we categorized as “Open Source Web 2.0 Content Management” and it is named Volano. Volano is based on eZ Publish and – you might have already guessed it – provides some cool Web 2.0 functionality on top of it. Volano itself is available under an Open Source license to YMC’s customers.

YMC provides support and services for Volano and currently focuses on the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). One major customer of YMC is Swiss Televsion SF where they use Volano for the website related to the daily news broadcast SF Tagesschau. A highly interesting implementation done by YMC is 029, a Web 2.0 portal where social travel booking takes place: A group of people can find the best package for joint holidays.

Corporate Design

Most of all, I am happy about the results achieved in creating a new corporate design for YMC. We started with the logo and then moved on to designing the website.

New YMC Website.

I especially do like the rings and the illustration used in the banner. The rings symbolize communities that sometimes overlap. The pieces of the rings sum up the individuals who are members of the community.

The illustration is great because it is a creative piece of art that is in sync with the banner’s claim that YMC combines spontaneity and quality in it’s Web 2.0 content management solution. Most importantly, the illustration highly differentiates YMC from other software companies, who tend to use stock photos of architectural buildings or even worse, of two business men shaking their hands.

The new corporate design also works well regarding booth designs, as this picture shows, taken at OpenExpo a few days ago:

YMC booth at OpenExpo 2008 (Credit: Andreas Heer).

The corporate design work also included the design of business cards, presentation slides, case studies, etc. and we are about to deliver the style guide to YMC.

Marketing Collaterals

We at InitMarketing assisted YMC in re-structuring and re-writing the content of www.ymc.ch to have it in sync with the more focused brand identity of YMC. We are currently in the proccess of coaching YMC when it comes to identifying and writing about thought leader topics on YMC’s corporate Weblog. Furthermore, we helped YMC in writing two case studies and delivered a case study template to them.

All this marketing work forms the basis for the public relations activities we just started for YMC.

Currently, customers at InitMarketing are solely companies who want us to support them in marketing their Open Source product. Yet, we do not work for community-driven Open Source projects which usually have an association or foundation as an organizing body.

The reason is quite simple: Associations or foundations which we have been in touch with lack money and business-focused decision-making processes. It seems to be much easier for companies to provide a sufficient marketing budget and to agree on a focused marketing strategy.

The cause mainly lies in how differently the two ecosystems are structured.

Company-driven Open Source Ecosystem

An Open Source company acts as the hub in its self-created ecosystem and can leverage all business advantages which stem from its superior knowledge of the product, copyright, etc.

Community-driven Open Source Ecosystem

Community-driven ecosystems lack a business hub. Usually the core of the community is focused on further developing the source code.

Pros and Cons: Company vs. Community

Of course, this is an overly simplistic comparison table. I know, there are companies that are pure chaos compared with some well working communities. Also, companies might employ their best community members over time which makes it impossible to draw a clear line between community and company. And so on… Nevertheless, the above mentioned points allow to understand the impact of the fundamental differences between a company- and a community-driven ecosystem on marketing, which I’ll discuss next.

Impact on Marketing

Communities trying to reach broad consensus will have a hard time focusing their marketing activities e.g. to clearly position their OSS project, because this requires bold decisions to spend the available budget on a specific target audience only. The higher an OSS project is in the software stack, the more this becomes a problem due to the fact that they need to attract end users and pragmatic buyers.

Open Source companies see a constant need to raise visibility through marketing to achieve better lead generation. Quite contrary, some core developers in communities might have strong prejudices against marketing and especially public relations (of course, the same can happen within a company, but the business prerogative will prevail). Additionally,  Then again, communities are quite good in spreading the word among peers.

Preparing a marketing budget is a serious issue for communities. They could collect it from system integrators who are part of the community, but they might want to invest the bulk of their marketing budget into pushing their own specific solutions and services. Nevertheless, if the main beneficiaries of an OSS project financially support general marketing efforts of the community, they will profit not only from shared development, but also from shared marketing costs.

Shared marketing is especially helpful if the OSS project is rather a platform or framework instead of an out-of-the-box solution. The danger is that community members tend to have varying views on an OSS platform. Different system integrators will use it to implement different custom solutions. The OSS project could potentially mean anything to anyone, which runs counter a sound positioning in the heads of potential new developers and customers.

In general, it is very important for OSS communities to educate themselves when it comes to marketing, which includes open discussions that result in clear decisions. While the OSS market continues to grow, so will competition. More Open Source communities will eventually take a closer look at how marketing can help them to distinguish themselves from the competition.

The Perspective of an Open Source Marketing Company

Seen from the perspective of InitMarketing, it is much easier for us to provide Open Source marketing services to companies.

The risk with communities is that discussions could take long and decisions could be delayed, which means that, potentially, InitMarketing would spend more time than we would get paid for. Additionally, OSS associations or foundations usually ask for a discount, which we are happy to provide, but which adds to the risk of not really being able to cover our costs and time investment.

There are benefits in working with OSS communities, most importantly that we could enjoy open discussions about marketing strategy, planning and implementation, because this allows anyone to see how well we do our job – or not – and we can learn a lot from a miriad of ideas and feedback. Last but not least, InitMarketing could help communities make the jump towards more professional marketing without sacrificing the community and its spirit – a challenge we can’t wait to accept.

Without understanding the target audience, Open Source businesses will not be able to effectively communicate with those who are supposed to buy their products, support, services and contribute to software development.

Ideally, the target audience has been defined in the corporate marketing strategy. Although this might seem obvious, most of the Open Source companies we work with at InitMarketing have a rather vague idea about whom they want to talk and sell to. The following reasons are typical:

• Open Source start ups have usually only broadly defined a go-to-market strategy and target audience in their business plan, which is good enough for their VCs who are rather interested in the grand picture which allows them to assess the business potential.
• Those Open Source companies who have in the past years organically grown their business from a one or two man show of developers to 10-30 staff members have always somehow made money with their product. They intuitively understand their target audience, but never reflected upon it to expand their business more quickly with a focused marketing strategy.
• Even large to super-large corporations who are in the Open Source business much too often lack a good understanding of their target audience. The reason being that business decisions of top management (such as “let’s start to port our software to Linux”) are being executed with poor strategic guidelines.

The Branding and Positioning page in my Wiki provides some ideas how to address the needs of your target audience – but how to understand them? Will you have to pay expensive market analysis programs? No, you don’t, because informed intuition comes to the rescue plus the fact that Open Source allows for incremental marketing.

Geoffrey A. Moore defines informed intuition in his classic marketing book Crossing the Chasm:

The key is to understand how intuition – specifically, informed intuition – actually works. Unlike numerical analysis, it does not rely on processing a statistically significant sample of data in order to achieve a given level of confidence. Rather, it involves conclusions based on isolating a few high-quality images – really, data fragments – that it takes to be archetypes of a broader and more complex reality. [...] so in marketing can whole target-customer populations become imagined as teenyboppers, yuppies, pickups and gun racks. These are all just images – stand-ins for a greater reality – picked out from a much larger set of candidate images on the grounds that they really “click” with the sum total of an informed person’s experience.

In his book, Moore further describes how to define sample scenarios that allow to understand the user, technical buyer and economic buyer. In essence, the definition of a target audience should be able to answer this little question: Why does your product matter?

Given that many of today’s successful Open Source businesses are alternatives to closed source competitors (e.g. Linux vs. Microsoft, MySQL vs. Oracle), it is quite easy for them to imagine their target audience. Such Open Source products are being used by developers, hence it is mostly developers developing for developers. To define a target audience, such companies basically just need to look at themselves.

The higher Open Source moves up the stack, the more important it becomes for Open Source software vendors and their partner companies to focus on end user needs, a target audience very different from how software programmers think. One example would be SugarCRM who successfully communicate to sales and marketing personnel across various industries.

Due to the Open Source development mantra release early, release often, companies can adjust their understanding of the target audience gradually at minimum risk, but only if they also follow the mantra of incremental marketing: communicate often, communicate early. They will automagically learn to understand their target audience as long as they make sure that they allow for interactive external communication for example through an online forum on their website and establish good internal communication within their organization between the development, marketing and sales teams.

The combination of informed intuition and incremental marketing forms a general business advantage for Open Source companies, because it allows them to minimize the risk of being guided by prejudices when it comes to understanding the target audience.

There is no need to spend a fortune in marketing dollars to launch a new Open Source product. You can create substantial buzz with a low marketing budget to win your first customers.

The basic rules are:

1. Don’t think big, think smart: Acquire a bootsrapper’s state of mind.
2. Communicate early, communicate often: For every step of your software development and release process, think of a related small marketing initiative.

The good thing about Open Source software is that there is nothing to hide. You can inform the public and let it participate in your project from the second you had the idea of building it. The openness of the Open Source development model allows low budget micro-marketing on the internet to build an ecosystem with emerging sales leads even before the product is ready for production use.

The benefits of launching a product the Open Source Marketing way are:

• Less error-prone: Just like the OSS model allows developers to modify the software incrementally based on feedback from a growing community, so does it allow Open Source Marketing to adjust campaigns on-the-fly based on interactive communication.
• Immediate results: Instead of spending a lot of time upfront on developing an optimal marketing solution, incremental and satisficing steps allow to achieve immediate marketing results with a very basic product marketing strategy to start from.
• Risk reduction: An OSS company can gradually grow its marketing efforts from tiny initiatives focusing on a very specific and small audience to large-scale global media campaigns in parallel to a growing customer base and confidence through an adaptive marketing approach.

Here are some sample marketing actions, applicable on different stages of the product development life cycle:

1. You got an idea about a new OSS product? Why not discuss it on your blog right from the start and invite others to comment on your thoughts? Most likely, you will get some good input that will allow you to tweak your idea and save money on business consulting. Furthermore, you have planted the first seed for growing a community related to your upcoming product by attracting visionaries.
2. Get the product website ready a month or two before you make the source code available. Provide a registration form where everyone can subscribe and get notified once you publish the code. This is how you can collect leads. You can later turn the notification service into a newsletter where you inform about upcoming releases.
3. Make the source code available publicly ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s ready for prime time yet (a perfectionist’s trap), get the software out there and continue developing it in SVN. There are plenty of great developers who enjoy trying out a cool new OSS product even in pre-alpha state. Maybe one of them will become a contributor and early adopter?
4. Of course, you will keep blogging about the progress of your development and business efforts to attract new community members and to increase loyalty of those already observing or participating in what you are doing.
5. It’s time for an alpha release. Create a blog about it, with brief general information about your product, including business benefits. If applicable, include some screenshots as well. Link to the installation documentation you wrote. Nicely ask some of your peers to blog about the release and to refer to your blog entry or the product website.
6. For the beta release, it might make sense to contact a PR or marketing agency (I heard of InitMarketing providing all sorts of OSS marketing services ) who help you to create some buzz in the blogosphere. Set up an invitation-only online demo which will allow you to collect some more leads. Include a screencast on the product website that explains what your software does and what it’s good for.

Once you have reached the beta release milestone, you might want to employ a marketing expert or outsource some marketing work to an agency. After the beta release you might start to charge for support, especially installation and configuration to companies who can afford that – make sure that you still help out those with related questions on the forum for free.

Additionally some early adopters might consider using your software in production based on their good impression of the beta release and once the stable version is out. These potential customers share your vision of the product and see the same business benefits as you do. They might pay you for standby support , consulting, customizing.

Inexpensive prosumer software and social media marketing tools allow you to decide for each task of a marketing action if you want to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. The same choice that OSS customers can make between investing time (install, configure, extend yourself) or money (get support and services from the OSS vendor) is true for OSS companies marketing their product.

For example, do you want to create the product screencast yourself or have a marketing agency record it? Do you want to upload it to YouTube or run your own video streaming platform? This choice allows you to keep your marketing efforts for a product launch low at the beginning and to expand your marketing budget over time as revenue grows.

Through our Open Source marketing consultancy, Stephe and I are currently in contact with Microsoft evaluating how we might help them with marketing their NXT partner program geared towards Open Source ISVs.

Very recently, Microsoft’s OSS partner program has been heavily criticized by Mary Jo Foley and Matt Asay (in reply, Stephe provides background information). Furthermore, the credo of InitMarketing is: “If you are Open Source, we will help you succeed”. Our corporate mission is to foster the success of Open Source in general.

Our first major concern was: Would an engagement with Microsoft foster the success of Open Source as far as their partner program is concerned? Could InitMarketing live up to its claim?

While Microsoft’s flagship products are not open source software, if InitMarketing helps open source ISVs to optimize their interoperability with Windows through the Microsoft partner program, then this will benefit Open Source vendors, opening up access to new customers and a higher distribution of their OSS products. From that standpoint, I believe InitMarketing can live up to its claim.

Our second major concern was that we might sacrifice InitMarketing’s yet young and innocent reputation as a trustful actor in the Open Source domain. To tackle this problem, we proposed to Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab and ISV team to make our work highly transparent to the Open Source community.

Microsoft supports us working in this transparent manner.

The benefits of open communication around the NXT program are clear for everyone involved:

• InitMarketing can establish itself as a neutral facilitator.
• The Microsoft ISV team can understand better the concerns of the open source community in general and ISVs in particular and gets valuable feedback which helps to improve the NXT program.
• By having InitMarketing communicate in the Open Source style (= transparently), it raises trust in the NXT program in the broader context of Microsoft messaging.

We feel very comfortable entering this sort of working relationship with Microsoft. We still value your feedback: Would you do Open Source marketing for Microsoft?, asks Stephe – please let him know your comments.

I don’t like marketing phrases trying to pull my leg even before I know what the offer is about. Recently, I received an email from my German mobile phone provider, it starts (translated from German):

You have to grab this chance!

… and I stopped reading and immediately deleted the email. Do they think they can talk me into a buying decision with an initial aggressive sentence?

I get the same feeling of being treated like an idiot after reading lots of information hardly finding the price of the offer, nor being able to make a choice. Try out Microsoft SharePoint Web site – how long will it take you to find a price tag? How much longer will it take until you got an idea which of the SharePoint product variants might be the right one for you?

Some products might need more explanation than others, but in the end, all a customer wants to know is: What do I get for which price?

Assuming that higher intelligence leads to higher income/revenue, why are those with a good spending power much too often being treated like idiots by marketing? Customers mature just like markets mature, urging marketing to catch up, make potential customers feel intelligent and acknowledge that they can decide for themselves.