[Linux-aus] Should we change? (Was: Re: Should we change? Yes. To change is to grow.)

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi Patrick, all

> I would like to see some research on the issue - can LA arrange or
> afford to do this? - or at least some meta study of examples of name
> changes in the field/industry and the consequence. Anyone have any
> links or seen anything similar?

Market research (and focus groups, etc) tend to yield what you want them to yield. The main beneficiaries are the people doing the research.
 
One of the key reasons for market research being generally borked is that if you have a new product or seek a market expansion, you're dealing with non-consumers (you're trying to attract a group of new clients who previously did not consider your product/brand).

Now, from observation of the past we can, to just name one example, see that markets tend to find products rather than the other way round. A typical example is where a company launches a product for a specific market, and a completely different group of people find it and become the main market. So essentially you don't know beforehand. That can be very annoying (lack of predictability), but that doesn't make it less so.

In our case, the purpose of changing focus or rebranding would be to attract new groups of people and companies (right?). There are some general things that a pretty obvious, some of which have already been discussed here.
"Free" is ambiguous", "Libre" requires additional linguistic understanding and generally more clarification. While "Open Source" as a term has its issues and companies have abused it, it's served us extremely well. Those are all useful things to keep in mind.

Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) MySQL services
Sane business strategy explorations at http://Upstarta.biz
Personal blog at http://lentz.com.au/blog/