Proposed rebranding in global perspective

Hello all,

A lot has already been said about the proposed rebranding, so let me first say briefly that I'm not in favour of the "Personal Edition" branding and I don't find the reasoning given for the word "personal" particularly convincing. Especially the suggestions that people would associate the word "community" with a support group for recovering addicts strike me as very odd, and completely contrary to my understanding of the nuances of English. I'm not sure what to make of "LibreOffice is developed by a friendly community", as it says on the website, if that were the case :slight_smile: So if there needs to be an "edition", let it be "Community Edition", which sends a message more in line with LO's licence and TDF's statutes, yet suggests that this edition is not something you want to rely on in an "enterprise" setting.

I'd like to thank Michael Meeks for his thought-provoking analysis, though, which makes the motivations behing the branding change more understandable. While I'm not necessarily sold on the idea of TDF's version of LO being an "edition", I agree that staying with the status quo would be risky for the overall health of the LO ecosystem as well. "Community Edition" could certainly be worth trying. At the very least, I don't think anyone so far has objected to adding the statement about TDF's version of LO being supported by volunteers. (I think it would be a welcome addition to help manage users' expectations.) Likewise, links and menu items that say "Get support" should IMO be rephrased to something closer to the actual state of affairs, that is, "ask nicely for support from volunteers who are under no obligation to fix your problems for you" (however you want to phrase that) and "buy support from our certified ecosystem partners".

The big issue I'd like to bring up is that the assumptions behind the marketing plan and Michael's analysis seem to be somewhat anglo/eurocentric, or perhaps more accurately "global north / major language centric". I live in Finland (very much in the global north, but not a player in the major language league), and I'm quite astonished to hear that in some countries lots of big companies are using LO and finding it as good as to need neither paid support nor MS Office. In Finland, MSO is ubiquitous in government and business, and the only "enterprise-scale" deployments of LO I'm aware of are in schools and universities. Even there, MS Office is generally the primary, recommended office suite, with LO offered as an alternative. The assumption that you could just "nudge" these institutions into buying support for LO in addition to, or instead of, paying for MSO licences is quite a bold one. I'm not saying it couldn't happen eventually (and I hope it does), but right now, a "LO personal edition, for individuals only" might very well just nudge the IT departments into uninstalling LO. (Maybe they'll install AOO instead, giving uninformed users and bosses the impression that FOSS office suites are basically abandonware.)

Countries like Finland where LO struggles to be taken seriously in business and government, whether due to political priorities or interoperability issues or insufficient localisation (I'm working on that...) or insufficient lobbying or lack of training materials or lack of a volunteer support community are in a completely different situation than countries like the UK where ODF is adopted in the goverment and all the world's English-language tutorials, templates and volunteer support are just one internet search away. Focusing marketing efforts on nudging non-paying users into buying support is premised on the idea that there are lots of happy non-paying users in enterprise settings, which I doubt is true at all in many parts of the world.

The interesting question is whether most of the world is more like Finland or more like the UK in this respect. I'd be interested if someone has actually done research on this, but my wild guess would be more like Finland. But another question arises: can you make more money by serving countries like Finland or countries like the UK? Most likely the latter. So I can understand very well that the ecosystem companies want to go after untapped potential in these large markets first. That's certainly their right, but TDF's mission is not to serve only the major languages and the global north.

If the "Personal Edition for individuals only" branding is adopted, we would have a situation where schools and businesses everywhere in the world are discouraged from using TDF's LO, yet in most countries you can't actually buy an enterprise edition with support in your own language, because none of the ecosystem companies are offering one. Companies based in the global north probably can't offer paid support at rates low enough to be feasible for much of the global south, anyway, regardless of their intentions. (This could be, BTW, an argument for why an all-megafauna ecosystem might not be the best idea.)

The code that the ecosystem companies commit into LO benefits everyone regardless of country or language, of course. But TDF should still be careful not to alienate the volunteer community. I'd say in most cases, without volunteer localisers drawn from an existing userbase, there would be no business opportunity for the ecosystem companies. The market for professional support outside of the major languages is unlikely to bootstrap itself without help from volunteers, governments or NGOs.

In any case, I'd be interested in hearing about the situation in other parts of the world and would recommend TDF to consider the global perspectives.

All the best,
Tuomas Hietala

Hi Tuomas,

  Thanks for engaging.

So if there needs to be an "edition",
let it be "Community Edition", which sends a message more in line with
LO's licence and TDF's statutes, yet suggests that this edition is not
something you want to rely on in an "enterprise" setting.

  Fair enough.

I'd like to thank Michael Meeks for his thought-provoking analysis,
though, which makes the motivations behing the branding change more
understandable. While I'm not necessarily sold on the idea of TDF's
version of LO being an "edition", I agree that staying with the status
quo would be risky for the overall health of the LO ecosystem as well.
"Community Edition" could certainly be worth trying.

  Good to hear that.

The big issue I'd like to bring up is that the assumptions behind the
marketing plan and Michael's analysis seem to be somewhat
anglo/eurocentric, or perhaps more accurately "global north / major
language centric". I live in Finland (very much in the global north, but
not a player in the major language league), and I'm quite astonished to
hear that in some countries lots of big companies are using LO and
finding it as good as to need neither paid support nor MS Office. In
Finland, MSO is ubiquitous in government and business, and the only
"enterprise-scale" deployments of LO I'm aware of are in schools and
universities.

  Ah - so, I'm always interested by this EU case study:

https://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc4ec2.pdf?id=27850

  From the Finnish Ministry of Justice. Section 3.4 "Support services" on
page 9/10 - has this gem:

[snip]
The conclusions of support service evaluation can be summarized as follows:

There is no need for an external Help Desk agreement with an external
service provider for OpenOffice.org user support. The need for support
appears seldom and expert services should be acquired on a case-by-case
basis.

The installations of OpenOffice.org software versions can be done as
internal work. External technical support services should be acquired on
a case-by-case basis.
[/snip]

  ie. it's as good/bad as the competition, why bother getting support
(except perhaps for configuration). I rather suspect that our code
quality is now significantly higher than in the days of OpenOffice.org
2.0.x =)

  From what I recall (and I may certainly be wrong), the Ministry
eventually switched to MS Office because they piled up lots of minor
problems, and had no effective support / product management / code-fix
partner to help them: but of course no doubt there are political angles
to every such decision.

  I've not read that for a long time, but it reads like a multi-million
Euro saving vs. the competition - with no investment back into
OpenOffice (at the time). I may be mis-reading but at least it fits my
personal narrative of life: the situation does suck for enterprises
without support in the longer term.

The assumption that you could just "nudge" these institutions into buying
support for LO in addition to, or instead of, paying for MSO licences is
quite a bold one.

  It would require some sort of grass-roots awareness, that large scale
deployments that don't contribute are really unhelpful, for sure =) How
do we build that awareness?

Maybe they'll install AOO instead

  I find that rather unlikely.

Focusing marketing efforts on nudging
non-paying users into buying support is premised on the idea that there
are lots of happy non-paying users in enterprise settings, which I doubt
is true at all in many parts of the world.

  I see these enterprises from time to time; and they don't even know
what harm they do (or what good they fail to do for themselves & the
community).

The code that the ecosystem companies commit into LO benefits everyone
regardless of country or language, of course. But TDF should still be
careful not to alienate the volunteer community.

  Of course.

In any case, I'd be interested in hearing about the situation in other
parts of the world and would recommend TDF to consider the global
perspectives.

  Likewise,

  ATB,

    Michael.

Michael Meeks kirjoitti 13.7.2020 klo 23.09:

  From what I recall (and I may certainly be wrong), the Ministry
eventually switched to MS Office because they piled up lots of minor
problems, and had no effective support / product management / code-fix
partner to help them: but of course no doubt there are political angles
to every such decision.

Yes, the Finnish Ministry of Justice stayed with OOo 3.3.0, never upgraded to LibreOffice and finally in 2018 plunked down 15 million euros for a grand IT revamp plan involving a move to MS products: https://www.tivi.fi/uutiset/hyvasti-openoffice-ministerio-siirtyy-microsoft-ohjelmiin-hanke-maksaa-15-miljoonaa-euroa/b40a9863-a2dc-3323-b976-cb4c2de20ced

At the same time, bureaus under the Ministry of Education were launching the digital matriculation exam making use of a live USB Linux distro and LibreOffice. I guess they didn't consider synergy effects. Considering the tiny size of our country, it is difficult to comprehend the level of myopia involved.

Ilmari

Hi Michael,

Michael Meeks kirjoitti 13.7.2020 23:09:

Hi Tuomas,

  Thanks for engaging.

My pleasure.

  Ah - so, I'm always interested by this EU case study:

https://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc4ec2.pdf?id=27850

  From the Finnish Ministry of Justice. Section 3.4 "Support services" on
page 9/10 - has this gem:

[snip]
The conclusions of support service evaluation can be summarized as follows:

There is no need for an external Help Desk agreement with an external
service provider for OpenOffice.org user support. The need for support
appears seldom and expert services should be acquired on a case-by-case
basis.

The installations of OpenOffice.org software versions can be done as
internal work. External technical support services should be acquired on
a case-by-case basis.
[/snip]

  ie. it's as good/bad as the competition, why bother getting support
(except perhaps for configuration). I rather suspect that our code
quality is now significantly higher than in the days of OpenOffice.org
2.0.x =)

Admittedly that sounds rather brutal for anyone wishing to sell support. Wrt. being good enough, the situation at the time was a bit different, though, as they were migrating from some fairly antiquated Lotus software to OOo. OOo might have actually been a significant leap forward in productivity for them. I'm not sure that necessarily holds true today wrt. LO and its proprietary competition.

I don't remember what was the state of Finnish localisation back then, but there might have also been better translation coverage of Help. Certainly the coverage for Help has been receding in recent versions of LO. Things like that might matter more than code quality.

  From what I recall (and I may certainly be wrong), the Ministry
eventually switched to MS Office because they piled up lots of minor
problems, and had no effective support / product management / code-fix
partner to help them: but of course no doubt there are political angles
to every such decision.

  I've not read that for a long time, but it reads like a multi-million
Euro saving vs. the competition - with no investment back into
OpenOffice (at the time). I may be mis-reading but at least it fits my
personal narrative of life: the situation does suck for enterprises
without support in the longer term.

I don't know the reasons behind the switch to MSO. From what I've heard, after the person leading the OOo migration effort retired, the Ministry never upgraded to anything newer. Not AOO, not LO. Not sure if they even upgraded to the final version of OOo. So there might haven been something else there too, but it's probably not useful to speculate.

They did release document templates they made IIRC as well as deployment / Q&A manuals in Finnish for everyone to use, so it's not fair to say that their contribution was exactly zero. But that's all outdated now, of course.

No doubt it was a cost-cutting measure. But then again, cost-cutting was part of the open source zeitgeist of the time. They believed the hype. They honoured the licence, even contributed back a bit. Who do we blame? Or should we blame anyone?

The assumption that you could just "nudge" these institutions into buying
support for LO in addition to, or instead of, paying for MSO licences is
quite a bold one.

  It would require some sort of grass-roots awareness, that large scale
deployments that don't contribute are really unhelpful, for sure =) How
do we build that awareness?

That's the crucial question. The Finnish authorities do invest in FOSS (by hiring developers, releasing code etc.), although mostly in cases where off-the-shelf solutions are inadequate. So we'd have to shift the perception of an office suite from being a commodity into being an investment.

The problem with office suites these days is that the proprietary competition is not inadequate. Not in terms of features, usability, or localisation anyway. Privacy and data sovereignty could be another matter. They're not really big themes in Finnish political discourse, though. If someone only could nudge that...

BR,
Tuomas

The big issue I'd like to bring up is that the assumptions behind the marketing plan and Michael's analysis seem to be somewhat anglo/eurocentric, or perhaps more accurately global north / major language centric".

That is because historically:
* LibreOffice made the most inroads in western/central Europe;
* Has been dominated by L1 & L2 users of English;
** If L1 & L2 users of Spanish dominated, the marketing plan would be
more Hispanic orientated;
** If L1 & L2 readers of Kanji/Hanzi dominated, the marketing plan would
be more CJKV orientated;
*** etc.

The hope/expectation is that the local (country/language) community will
adapt it, to their local needs & issues.

I live in Finland (very much in the global north, but not a player in the major language league

hear that in some countries lots of big companies are using LO and finding it as good as to need neither paid support nor MS Office.

Typically, what has happened, is that some idiot convinced the company
that FLOSS was gratis, and that that also mean that support was gratis.
  Since the value proposition that they were sold on, was that there
would never be a financial outlay for FLOSS, that is what they do.

This value proposition pops up, whenever politicians try to move their
government agency from FLOSS to a proprietary solution. Obviously, it is
misleading, but technically, it is not inaccurate.

Finland, MSO is ubiquitous in government and business, and the only "enterprise-scale" deployments of LO I'm aware of are in schools and universities. Even there, MS Office is generally the primary, recommended office suite, with LO offered as an alternative.

That is pretty much the case, wherever Microsoft has established itself.

Countries like Finland where LO struggles to be taken seriously in
business and government, whether due to political priorities or
interoperability issues or insufficient localisation (I'm working on
that...) or insufficient lobbying or lack of training materials or lack
of a volunteer support community are in a completely different situation

than countries like the UK where ODF is adopted in the government and all

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76842 is from a
government agency in the UK, that didn't have a support contract.

ODF might be official government policy, but funding for LibreOffice
isn't guaranteed.

the world's English-language tutorials, templates and volunteer support are just one internet search away. Focusing marketing efforts on nudging
non-paying users into buying support is premised on the idea that there are lots of happy non-paying users in enterprise settings, which I doubt
is true at all in many parts of the world.

The interesting question is whether most of the world is more like
Finland or more like the UK in this respect. I'd be interested if
someone has actually done research on this, but my wild guess would be
more like Finland.

But another question arises: can you make more money by serving countries like Finland or countries like the UK? Most likely the latter.

The figure to look at, is gross profit, not gross revenue.

(Google translate is acting up on me, again, so I had to rely on my
ability to read/translate Finnish.)
If I understood the Finnish government site on SMBs, the average SMB in
Finland has a lower annual gross revenue, than the average SMB in the
UK. However, it looks like their profit margins were about the same.
Looking at the data from Lesotho, both gross revenue, and profit margins
for SMBs are lower than the Finland.

Creating a new market is expensive. Maybe for Finland, definitely for
Lesotho, a tech support company would literally be creating the market
for FLOSS. In Finland, the "gift economy" aspect of FLOSS might not have
as dramatic a negative impact on revenue, as in Lesotho.

So I can understand very well that the ecosystem companies want to go after untapped potential in these large markets first. That's
certainly their right, but TDF's mission is not to serve only the major languages and the global north.

Over the last twenty or so years, there have been organisations, usually
non-profit, in various parts of the globe, whose mission has been to
introduce FLOSS to minority language users. Their efforts have subsided
over time, mainly due to a combination of inadequate funding, and well
placed bribes by vendors of proprietary solutions.

In talking with people who study, and protect extinct/endangered
languages, they uniformly emphasized that what is needed is for the
tools to be able to correctly display the glyphs, and provides accurate
spell checking and grammar checking. Users, for the most part, are
bilingual in both the endangered language, and the local dominant
language. Having the UI in a language other than the endangered one, is
usually acceptable, but some groups do consider it a matter pride, when
the UI is in their language, even if they can't read it.

Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian,
Japanese, Punjabi, German, Javanese, Malay, Telugu, Viet, Korean,
French, Marathi, Tamil, or Urdu is the L1 language of roughly 57% of the
global population. The L1 or L2 language of roughly 90% of the global
population, is one of those languages.

Thus, I would expect the major players in the LibreOffice Ecosystem to
support those languages, whilst local firms did the hard work of
evangelising FLOSS, providing l10n services, support, and bug fixes for
the other 5990 odd natural languages that are currently spoken.

The code that the ecosystem companies commit into LO benefits everyone
regardless of country or language, of course. But TDF should still be
careful not to alienate the volunteer community. I'd say in most cases,
without volunteer localisers drawn from an existing userbase, there
would be no business opportunity for the ecosystem companies. The market
for professional support outside of the major languages is unlikely to
bootstrap itself without help from volunteers, governments or NGOs.

Typically, what happens with government funding, is that one gets an
initial grant, to translate, or localise a specific program/group of
programs, but there is no follow-up money, and locally generated revenue
doesn't cover enough to fund ongoing l10n development.

The ideal scenario, is that after the initial localisation is done, a
local commercial outfit gets a support contract with a government
agency, which is enough to cover both the needs of the specific agency,
and fund ongoing l10n development.

Ideally, the code changes from the L10N work, go upstream, and are
incorporated in future product releases.

jonathon