you might reason that since humans behave like herd animals, so that
when some run, all run. The stimulus evoking action must be the most
convincing, hence
the facts can be distorted.
For Libre office number eight it might suffice to claim the usual "the
changes will assure your improved experience and safety". WHile making
it quite clear that one i just mirroring the unscientific postures of
other computing programs.
p.
Den 06-04-2023 12:06 skreiv Italo Vignoli:
On 06/04/23 10:08, Eyal Rozenberg wrote:
That is exactly what I'm opposing. Let's assume that the real
situation is "boring" (I'm not sure that's the case, but still) and
that, indeed, the changes since 7 are not fundamental enough to merit
a version bump on their own (and I realize this is not in consensus
either). In this state of affairs, evoking artificial interest in a
new major version without substance behind it is a _marketing trick_,
a psychological manipulation. One could even say it's mis-informing
our users. It hurts user trust. Sure, it's not terrible to play with
version numbers, but - I don't think that's something our users,
current and potential, would like us to do.
All major releases of Microsoft Office are managed by marketing, as all
major releases of proprietary software and hardware companies, and not
by developers, and are based on what you call "marketing tricks".
By the way, marketing is a profession - as development - which is based
on a specific professional background, and on a mindset which is 100%
different from the mindset of a developer.
This is probably the reason why developers, and in general people with
a strong technical background, do not understand marketing and consider
it useless. Marketing is the opposite of science, and is based on
behaviour analisys (which is the "least scientific" science, although
some people are trying to "smuggle" it as science).
I have been a marketing executive for the last 42 years (since 1981),
and the best marketing strategies I have managed during that time have
been based on gut feelings (including the launch of Photoshop and PDF,
when I was a marketing consultant for Adobe, and they both were huge
success).
Given that Microsoft Office's market share is well over 50%, it looks
like users of office suites do like marketing tricks. Please remember
that around 98% of users are not able to judge features.
I am not contributing to QA for a very simple reason: I am not able to
understand if the software behaviour is right or wrong (unless is clear
as in the case of font embedding in macOS), and this is because I am
not interested in technical details but I look at the wider picture.
Even if I am technically illiterate, outside the open source
environment I am considered a geek because I usually am more competent
than 98% of "normal" software users.
It should be clear that 80% (and probably more) of what we communicate
is targeted to "normal" software users, and not to community members or
to people with a technical background, who are already using
LibreOffice (or refuse to use it for technical reasons). They are not
our target, given that office suites are commodities.
Our target is mis-informed and mis-educated by Microsoft, but doesn't
realize it. On the contrary, they trust Microsoft more than they trust
open source software.
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