The only thing I believe that might be misunderstand is the therm: "General Productivity User". Though it's properly defined I believe that everyone uses different contexts for that very same expression.
Comparing Fedora with openSuSE is strange. openSuSE is most likely one of the most used in Europe, and though I don't have geographical data to support this, I would recon most of its users/contributors are located in Europe, while Fedora seems to be strong in the America's, specially South/Central America and Asia (India).
Most documents on openSuSE fail to point at least 2 things, that in my opinion are their strongest point at the moment, and their 'evangelical' tools:
#1 - OpenOffice Novell Edition > Please be mindful that this has no impact on Fedora Community as most people on the defined user base won't have any interest on this. Though for the the spectrum of users that are not our target, that is a very powerful weapon to deploy more openSuSE on the field, specially in Europe smallest economies where most of the corporate tissue resides on medium/small enterprises. It is also important that with the European efforts in placing FOSS tools under public administration, that will become a very potent tool to make up peoples minds. Once more, this has no impact for the user base that Fedora tries to reach.
#2 - Building Platform > This directly affects us and seems to be ignored. This happens to be a very real threat to Fedora as it provides very powerful means for people less skilled technically. The software available through this platform on openSuSE's repositories is awesome and it might change the idea most people have on packaging, specially introducing a concept of 'do it yourself'.
Please do not ignore those 2 things are very approached on a very superficial way and that on the long might provide a very potent threat to us. Novell has a very interesting story regarding small niches of market.
From my understanding which will soon be also available on the SWOT this is how I would point this:
Fedora > Aims to deploy premier cutting edge technology. At some point it's a distribution oriented to technology development. I would consider Fedora as a distribution oriented as a base for another distributions. Fedora doesn't provide it's own identity on a distro and kicks most of the other distros in feature availability and software versions. This is interesting because Fedora seems to be an ever on-going development (which at some point makes it incompatible with the normal market demands), but on the other hand it probably it the most rich distro in technological therms.
openSuSE > Aims to deploy premier Production Environment covering many fields. This is oriented to all users, specially to some very potent market niches in Europe. Heritage from SuSE and reputation make them a powerful and competitive distro. openSuSE is a direct threat more to Canonical which aims to compete in the same league than to Fedora itself. openSuSE finally is starting to introduce and identity and a brand. For those who don't know openSuSE, please just consider their -branding- packages which deploy and ugly theme (Sonar) and some other stuff. Despite it's design is un-attractive, if improved (and Sonar is the subject of many ports at the moment, and has probably the most complete sound theme), it can actually rival Ubuntu and place a decent fight.
I am not sure if we should pay much attention to Novell/openSuSE while we are both clearly aiming for very different things, specially in user base therms.
Regarding user base therms, I was aware of the links provided, but not aware of the triangle. The triangle does support my initial thoughts, there is a scalling off of the user base based on the degree of knowledge from the users. The user base defined by Fedora is actually very incompatible with openSuSE's user base, which eventually does reinforce that openSuSE and Fedora have way different positioning and stratification of their market niches.
Actually this is not the right time, but the biggest threat to Fedora isn't coming from Novell, but instead from Canonical. As it was released later (I don't have a link), in August Canonical plans to announce their partnerships/ventures with OEM hardware manufacturers/distributors. If this happens, I would believe that in the long run, most distributions will be unable to stop Canonical and their ever growing user base.
I understand that no one gives a damn about such things, but 2010/2012 period might provide Canonical with a slingshot effect on their user base, if that hasn't happened already. Canonical has a good eye and good Cathedral Engineering as a distro.
I would recommend people taking more attention to Canonical than exactly to Novell which only cares about protecting the remnants of their market niches.
Just a couple of thoughts outside the FOSS world.
"
2010/6/8 John Poelstra
<poelstra@redhat.com>
Robyn Bergeron said the following on 05/29/2010 10:21 AM Pacific Time:
> Someone (forgive me, I forget who... sorry!) linked this to me on IRC
> the other day and I thought it was very cool and interesting - and
> thought I'd share some of the bits with others.
>
> openSUSE has their strategy, SWOT, and industry assessments posted
> online, openly and transparently (kudos to them!). I think they have
> done an awesome job thus far.
> http://en.opensuse.org/Documents
>
> They also have a link to the survey they did in February 2010 (8700
> participants!) - generally surveying who their users are, what they
> are using linux for, what types of development they do, etc.
> http://en.opensuse.org/UX/openSUSE_Survey_2010
>
> There is also a link to this page: http://www.90-9-1.com/ - which I
> thought was very interesting, particularly in light of the user base
> discussions and diagrams that we've all seen. Essentially 90-9-1 dives
> into (no, no, PLOWS into) these three points:
>
> * 90% of users are the “audience”, or lurkers. The people tend to
> read or observe, but don’t actively contribute.
> * 9% of users are “editors”, sometimes modifying content or adding
> to an existing thread, but rarely create content from scratch.
> * 1% of users are “creators”, driving large amounts of the social
> group’s activity. More often than not, these people are driving a vast
> percentage of the site’s new content, threads, and activity.
>
> (Incidentally, if you haven't seen the User Base information, I
> encourage you to do so: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base . I
> was also looking for the page that has the user base triangle diagram
> - does anyone know where that is?)
It turned into a circle,
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Poelstra/What_is_a_target_audience
The original triangle version is still here:
http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/paste-bin/user-base-v4.pdf
John
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