(1) Of course, word-of-mouth is always helpful. But what is the reason it spreads and goes ‘viral’? There’s always a reason or two.

In contrast to your opinion, Apple is great at starting word of mouth. One source are their TV campaigns: The “1984″ ad is considered the greated commercial in the history of the SuperBowl, “Think Different” won a slew of awards and developed a cult-following, “Get A Mac” is so popular, Linux supporters have to clone it, too.

Another source is indeed the face of Apple, Steve Jobs, his reputation, and his PR campaigns. Another is, of course, their amazing products: iTunes, iPhone, etc.

People have good reasons to talk about Apple. For most Linux distributions, though, there’re no such reasons.

Ubuntu is the only exception right now: They have a better product than their competitors and a representative, journalists can interview, namely Marc Shuttleworth. That’s why many people today confuse Linux with Ubuntu. But the desktop makes no money for Shuttleworth, so we won’t see TV ads anytime soon.

(2) Another important question is: Are there reasons why word-of-mounth won’t go ‘viral’? Yes, especially in Linux’ case.

In general, people don’t care about operating systems — whether you call it Linux or Ubuntu or something else. What their care about is to get things done. They care about applications. This is where Linux fails.

People want applications. There are about 37,000 for Windows. There are many great ones for the Mac. But where are the great desktop applications for Linux? Applications you can’t get for Windows or Mac, also? Maybe there are a few, but people don’t know about them. Why that?

Word-of-mounth doesn’t work for Linux applications. Just look at one of these popular blog topics “20 Linux apps you can’t live without”: they are either well known and boring — or it’s a pain in the ass to get them installed.

I once checked a list of “great” multimedia applications I were given. 40 percent of them were not in the repositories or had no package for my distribution. The other 60 percent were present but I had to search for each of them. Often I had to find the right package in a bunch of results.

It’s also a pain in the ass to burn a list of good application on a CD and share them with your friends. It’s even a pain to find knowledgeable people for a particular problem: They are spread across several mailing lists or forums — one for Ubuntu, one for Fedora, one of OpenSuse, etc. etc.

Journalists have a hard time to promote good applications, too. You either have to waste your reader’s time by presenting detailed installation instructions or you waste your reader’s time by letting them figure it out for themselves. Simply putting the promoted application on a CoverCD doesn’t work, because there’s no package format that works across all distribution. The same holds for drivers.

Even commercial and non-commerical software developers have a hard time promoting their own products due to the lack of a proper installation format. No commercial vendor is going to rely on a bunch of volunteer packagers to promote, distribute and sell his products.

Why should we expect anyone to talk about Linux? Yes, it’s a little bit more secure and it’s a little bit more stable but that’s it. For most people, that’s no compelling reason to switch.

People are risk-averse. They don’t invest time to learn something new unless they are convinced it will pay of. But they’ve been disappointed so many times by false or misleading promises, they don’t buy our promises, either.

And for good reasons: “This is the year of the Linux desktop” was promoted so many times and Linux still didn’t make any impact in the desktop market.

And the reason is obvious: You can’t rely on volunteers to offer proper solutions. Let’s say, I talk a friend into using Linux. One day, he may want to do harddisk recording or cut his family videos or make a video animation. But I doubt Linux will then enable him to do the stuff he wants.

Maybe the application will be there, but it will be hidden behind ugly and unusable web pages, hard to find and hard to install, probably undocumented with experts spread across several IRC channels, distribution-specific mailing lists and forums.

And you want me to talk my friends into using Linux? Sure, I’ll do so the day it’s not a risk, anymore.

I think that besides the nice Apple word of mouth, I’d say that Apple definitely makes high quality stuff. I don’t mean that Mac OS X is more usable, or nicer or whatever than KDE or Gnome. I just mean that it *just runs*. For example, I’ve just updated my iBook to Lenny and for some reason the touchpad doesn’t work well anymore (known bug, with a known fix : modprobe -r appletouch; modprobe appletouch). Another example, I’ve installed Kubuntu on a friend’s PC and he wanted to play mp3. Those are not enabled by default, you have to install specific packages for that. No problem except that the package one is told to install is quite difficult to reach with the KDE package tool (many search to do, package not found, etc.).

So, obviously, I can live with those bugs, it’s just a matter of a few Google search and a bit of options to set, a bit of console… But the fact is that for a newcomer, as you said, the guy is expecting *at least* that the damn thing works 100% well as soon as it is turned on. A Mac comes with a perfectly working operating system (at least for the first hour) and a PC comes with windows preinstalled by your favourite reseller who has made sure that it works, again, for the first hour (not always true, we all know Micro$oft)… I had to fix the problems in front of my friends, and well, the first impression was not jawdropping.

So to sum it up : my experience is that even for non exotic configuration, Linux has sometimes (at least for me), some little bugs that prove to be showstopper for “common” users.

For the marketing side, I’d say that everybody knows at least one person who can talk about Windows, or about Mac. But that’s much harder for Linux. I’m working in an IT company and nobody uses Linux in my openspace (15+ people). So maybe it’s not a problem of marketing but just a problem of critical mass. There is a word-of-mouth phase and now, we can see Ubuntu which is working hard at selling Linux, that is marketing in a more conventional way.

(not sure if I make myself clear… )
stF

That said, the article probably underestimates the effect of conventional marketing in mass media. Desktop Linux has had shockingly little of it. A large proportion on computer users still don’t even know that Linux exists. Likely they also don’t care, either, but at least they need to know that an alternative exists before they can ask questions about it.

But that brings up the question, don’t distros do their own marketing? Maybe they should just do more?

Oh and a strong vendor market.

Oh and that market dynamic that allows funding to get to developers.

Lots to do outside of programming.

very fun read