On 07/14/2011 09:18 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
Hey Matt,
Thanks for the comments
Do you think these are still the top 5?
1) New UI design!
2) RHEV-M and VMWare vSphere support
3) Deployable concept
4) aeolus-image CLI
5) Reduced complexity
Or is there something else we should be promoting?
Easily yum-installable in Fedora 16 to take for a test drive? :)
Honestly - that type of thing is often the difference between someone
thinking something sounds like more work than they'd like to invest, or
taking a stab at it.
I think there are definitely non-technical things which could be
considered Features:
* What's the infrastructure of participation like? The governance model?
Let's say I'm a developer - If I can join in and make contributions,
that's great to hear. If I can join in and participate and influence
via meritocracy, without the requirement of being from a Big Name
Company and having a seat on the Board, that's probably a feature.
People like the idea of being able to be a big fish in a small pond,
rather than a small fish in a big pond.
* Reinforce the ideas of vendor neutrality, the ideas of not being
tied-in. As we say in Fedora-land - "Freedom is a feature" :)
I would really encourage making sure you're hitting two audiences with
this -- individual people, specifically developers and sysadmin-types,
and also the more general "IT decision maker" types. The individual
developers and sysadmin-types are the ones who are going to be taking
this for a test run -- and they're also the people who will be
convincing their bosses that they should have time to participate, or
that the product should be an option under consideration. The latter
group is more self-explanatory, obviously, but they're going to want to
hear that this is something they could move to without having to
destroy/vastly change what they've already built up in terms of
infrastructure. We do similar marketing in Fedora, and we generally
break up our features by who they're targeted at - individual desktop
users, sysadmins, and developers.
Speaking of Fedora :) -- I'm sure everyone's aware that there are some
good-sized portions of Aeolus going into F16. And I expect that it will
get some good marketing there. The release is at the end of October,
and it should be a fairly good "test run" in terms of seeing what is
resonating with folks in the press -- a timely point to fine tune your
messaging to what the press is picking up on, or to readjust if they're
missing things. My instinct tells me that there will probably be at
least a Fedora community-based interview with someone from Aeolus, and
an associated press blog post, in addition to highlighting in the
general release announcements, marketing collateral, etc. Knowing what
*you* guys think are the key points makes some of this a lot easier for
us, so I'll be sure to stay tuned to see what that final list of
features looks like.
-Robyn