Does Linux Have a Marketing Problem?

'On Hackaday's hosting site Hackaday.io, an electrical engineer with a
background in semiconductor physics argues that Linux's small market
share is due to a lack of marketing:

Not only does [Linux] have dominance when raw computing ability is
needed, either in a supercomputer or a webserver, but it must have
some ability to effectively work as a personal computer as well,
otherwise Android wouldn't be so popular on smartphones and tablets.
From there it follows that the only reason that Microsoft and Apple
dominate the desktop world is because they have a marketing group
behind their products, which provides customers with a comfortable
customer service layer between themselves and the engineers and
programmers at those companies, and also drowns out the message that
Linux even exists in the personal computing realm...

Part of the problem too is that Linux and most of its associated
software is free and open source. What is often a strength when it
comes to the quality of software and its flexibility and
customizablity becomes a weakness when there's no revenue coming in to
actually fund a marketing group that would be able to address this
core communications issue between potential future users and the
creators of the software. Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE and others all had
varying successes, but this illistrates another problem: the
splintered nature of open-source software causes a fragmenting not
just in the software itself but the resources. Imagine if there were
hundreds of different versions of macOS that all Apple users had to
learn about and then decide which one was the best for their needs...

I have been using Linux exclusively since I ditched XP for 5.10 Breezy
Badger and would love to live in a world where I'm not forced into the
corporate hellscape of a Windows environment every day for no other
reason than most people already know how to use Windows. With a
cohesive marketing strategy, I think this could become a reality, but
it won't happen through passionate essays on "free as in freedom" or
the proper way to pronounce "GNU" or the benefits of using Gentoo
instead of Arch. It'll only come if someone can unify all the
splintered groups around a cohesive, simple message and market it to
the public.'

-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/11/03/2012226

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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