On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Paul Nelson wrote:
I challenge you to call HP, Dell, IBM or Gateway and ask them for a quote on a K12LTSP lab for a school. Place the call directly to their educational sales rep.
People have a hard time using what they don't have and can't get.
Honestly, give it a try. Someone try it and report back to this list what happens.
K12LTSP motto: It works. It's free. Duh...
And the hardest part of that to explain is...
So I've been talking with lots of folks both inside and outside the company about this. And what I hear from the inside folks is really interesting.
We've got a sales team that is, in fact, responsible for selling into schools. They're called the "FED/SLED" team -- FEDeral gov't, State/Local gov't, EDucation.
They've got a sales number to hit. I can't go into details, but suffice to say... it's not terribly ambitious. :)
And why is that? Two reasons, it seems like:
(a) We don't have that much to sell that *clearly* targets the space. (b) Even if we did, we don't have the manpower to sell it.
And the fact that (b) is a problem seems to prevent us from making serious headway on (a).
So now I'm starting to believe that the way forward looks something like this:
1. Find a way of associating the Red Hat name with worthy education projects. Of which K12LTSP is clearly one, but there are others.
2. Build a channel. Red Hat will never be able to service schools directly, ever -- and neither can Dell/HP/whomever, because even if they *did* sell systems with K12LTSP built in, they wouldn't realistically be able to service schools either.
But we *can* provide expertise to local partners who can.
Maybe we can provide strong mechanisms for giving channel partners the ability to go sell the crap out of "a proven solution" -- which is training for school admins, plus some low cost/high value level 2 support, plus some other stuff that is valuable for the partners. And in my internal discussions with Redhatters, this is now looking like a sensible goal to shoot for: channel enablement.
But wait -- K12LTSP works, and it's free! True enough. But Red Hat has lived in this paradox for a long time:
A lot of smart people, for some reason, just don't *trust* free.
In the big commercial markets, that's fantastic for us, and allows us to grow a great business and subsidize further development of Linux and open source.
But in the education market, this weird distrust of free-ness gets in the way of changing the way computers work in schools.
My goal now: to come up with a business model that makes Red Hat *just* enough money -- and it doesn't have to be much in the larger scheme of things -- to push forward the one-to-one message.
I'll be at NECC. Steve, I'll see you there. I'm sure I'll be talking first hand with a lot of you as well.
--g