Re: Proposed Letter Text to Decision-makers - Re-Draft

On Thursday 02 January 2003 08:47 pm, Sim Brigden wrote:
> RE-DRAFT per comments from "Jan C. Depner" <[email protected]>
>
> The following is a letter I'm drafting.  I propose that it be sent to
> non-technical decision-makers in Government.  I would very much welcome
> your views on how to improve/refine it.
>               ...

I hope you don't mind comments from a complete lurker.  This is
just the 0.02/USD of an engineer with no marketing ear at all.  It
might be better to ignore it completely.

The entire tone of this letter seems to be "We have something that's
almost as good as Microsoft, and it may be cheaper."  This seems a
weak argument to me.  Look at what you say in several of your
paragraphs.
  1.) KGroupware will duplicate Outlook functionality.
  2.) The Mozilla paragraph seems fine.
  3.) The OO paragraph says essentially "Everything about OO is almost
      as good as Word.  It's not 100% perfect at reading Word files, and
      doesn't understand Excel macros, but other than that it's almost
      as good."  Don't underestimate the value of Excel macros to
      users.  I have heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an oil
      rig controlled in part by Excel macros.  My wife, the electronics
      manufacturing manager, had enormously complex Excel macros to
      handle procurement problems, and even used Excel to design a
      backplane.  Saying it doesn't understand Excel macros seems to
      me to be a severe disincentive to using OO.
  4.) The phrase "becoming seriously mature" sounds to me like
      "becoming seriously mature, but isn't there yet."  The phrase
      "seriously mature" seems somehow odd to me as a phrase.  It
      sounds somewhat Gee-Whiz to me, but that's perhaps just my
      ear.  The word "becoming" is just bad news.
  5.) "Linux is not as user-friendly as Windows" and "There is very
      little you can do in Windows that you can't do in Linux" both
      are instances of the same notion: Linux is just not as good as
      Windows.  Compare them with "Linux is user-friendly." or
      "Linux does more than Windows has ever done or is likely
      to do."  If you could make an argument for the latter two,
      you would have something.
  6.) The paragraph on Apache is fine, though it could be beefed up.
  7.) The paragpaph on Samba seems fine as well, though perhaps you could
      add something explaining what it does.  "the glue that securely
      links computers and users together in the office network" sounds
      either vacuous or painful, depending on how literally you take the
      words.
  8.) The real strength of Linux, whatever you think it is, is buried deeply
      in the text of the latter paragraphs.  To my mind, the strength of      
      Linux is that you can more often tell what's going on than with
      Windows, when something goes wrong.  That's not clearly stated
      anywhere, though it's not clear that's a good selling point.  Your
      reader might say "Why are things going wrong all the time."

Finally, putting all the applications in front of the requirements-like
discussion at the end seems backward.  I would put you strengths at the
top, and that's what is listed in the second half - cost, hw independence,
sw format independence, tailoring, stability.  I would think those should
be at the very beginning, so that the value of the apps adds to what
the reader has already become interested in.
-- 
Codex Gratia Codici
Bill White                 [email protected]
617-566-7461(Home)
617-699-8869(Cell)

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