Is personality in a press release a good idea? We might just want to keep it factual. Not to diss on Waldo's edits, but "We think OS X users will be blown away by NeoOffice®/J's amazing feature set." sounds a little too much like M$ or Apple hype for my comfort.
It might just be me, but I tend to throw out computers that blow me away. For safety reasons - and I have an MSc in Chemistry so I am no stranger to handling dangerous materials.
I prefer to err on the side of understating, but I am not a marketeer.
Anyone care to react?
Don't overstate the capabilities of NeoOffice/J at any time. Doing so would reduce the value of NeoOffice/J. Hype is definately not something that would help and actually hurt NeoOffice/J.
There are no more Bizarro-Patrick quotes (in fact, no Patrick quotes at all).
Right now I think the announcement is in pretty good shape (some real Patrick quotes would be nice, and we need to get Ed's approval for the "Ed" quotes), but otherwise I don't think there's major work needed on the announcement. Just all the ancillary stuff in the Press Kit.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Right now I think the announcement is in pretty good shape (some real Patrick quotes would be nice, and we need to get Ed's approval for the "Ed" quotes), but otherwise I don't think there's major work needed on the announcement. Just all the ancillary stuff in the Press Kit.
If you give me a point to focus one, I can whip up a quote. I'm just at a loss as to what point to make.
The section in which fantasy-Patrick-cousin-of-Steve-Jobs was orginally providing quotes was the "development and testing" section (well, there was another generic quote elsewhere, but it was totally excised instead of commented-out):
Old Announcement Draft wrote:
Extensively Beta Tested
"Our beta-testing program lasted several months, so we're obviously very excited about this release," says lead developer Patrick Luby. "We think people who haven't tried open-source software before will enjoy NeoOffice®/J's stability and ease-of-use. You get everything you'd expect in an office suite. But here's what I think makes NeoOffice®/J special-- you can download and use as many copies as you like, on as many computers as you want, for free."
Public responses to the beta-program have been extremely positive. "Entire companies have switched over and now use NeoOffice®/J exclusively as their office suite," Luby says. "It's saved them a ton of money."
There are some good kernels in that section that I'd like to see back in the announcement, but it's obvious that the "feel" of the paragraphs as they stood do not reflect Patrick's sensibilities. So a quote somewhere in this general area would help rehabilitate this section and allow it to be included.
Smokey
P.S. Waldo, you have a PM about another subject.... _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 12:43 am Post subject: Press Kit update
I did a lot of playing around in the press kit tonight. Someone needs to read through and proof my editing
Also, Oscar, your screenshot looks like it is pre-patch-whatever that gave us the lighter colors. Can you check that when you get a chance?
I forget what the issues were with "displaying" vs. "linking" the logo-type images (other than the images are going to be large in some cases, and they don't have a "local" url [my iDisk), so there's that to be decided.
What other logo-type images (or sizes) do we want to provide?
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 5:23 am Post subject:
Slightly off the subject... the Press Kit page doesn't render correctly in OmniWeb 5.1:
All the other wiki pages do... it is just this one page for some reason. I haven't checked any other browsers (other than Safari 2.0, where it renders fine) but it may be an issue to be aware of. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 9:41 am Post subject: Re: Press Kit update
sardisson wrote:
I did a lot of playing around in the press kit tonight. Someone needs to read through and proof my editing
Also, Oscar, your screenshot looks like it is pre-patch-whatever that gave us the lighter colors. Can you check that when you get a chance?
I'm working on new icons, but it will take a few days. When that is done a new screenshot is as good as posted.
Best wishes,
Oscar
P.S. Any idea when RC1 will be released? _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Rather than post directly in the wiki, I thought I would share our contribution (requested some weeks back) about the switch to NeoOfficeJ at the World Scout Bureau central office.
"This release of NeoOfficeJ 1.1 is a very welcome development," explains Ray Saunders, Director of Information Technology at the World Scout Bureau, based in Geneva, Switzerland. "Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours. The real benefits lie elsewhere, however. With NeoOfficeJ now running OpenOffice seemlessly on our Macs, our users here have joined the growing numbers worldwide who are very happy to work with the only truly multi-platform, multi-lingual office suite around. We have begun the process of demonstrating to our 28 million Scouts worldwide that switching to open-standards based software is a genuine commitment to breaking down artificial barriers that have been built between peoples and, ultimately, to building a better world."
Edit: Comments/reactions/suggestions welcome! _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
Joined: Jul 01, 2004 Posts: 45 Location: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 3:06 am Post subject: open source scouts
Great stuff, Ray. It's an amazingly positive case study.
Only two micro-niggles:
'seamless' not 'seemless' in sentence four.
Could that 'however' in the third sentence go at the beginning to make the sentence stronger? Maybe it could be tweaked to read:
'Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours; however, the real benefits lie elsewhere.'
MrGruff <----- who is very much in favour of semi-colons
Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 3:11 am Post subject: Re: open source scouts
MrGruff wrote:
Great stuff, Ray. It's an amazingly positive case study.
Only two micro-niggles:
'seamless' not 'seemless' in sentence four.
Agreed!
Quote:
'Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours; however, the real benefits lie elsewhere.'
Agreed. My only purpose in trying to go for short sentences (when I can!) is to try to make it easier for non-native English readers. In this case, I think your solution strikes the right balance.
Thanks for these inputs. Anyone else? _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
I always prefer to try and refer to apps by their correct names/spellings, i.e., NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org, in anything that we're readying for media consumption.
Could you mention something about the "fuctionality"/"training" side of the switch, too? I.e., "Neo/J seamlessly opened our Word documents with only minor formatting discrepancies, and our users felt right at home in Neo/J after a few minutes of studying the different names for functions" or some similar expression of "positive honesty"?
Provided, of course, that those were the results--I know you've mentioned a few Excel glitches, but my impression has been that by and large there was nothing "serious", only minor things one might expect when switching something, like different controls on your new car's radio....
A reassuring "hard facts of functionality" to go along with the "moral advocacy" would make the "migration story" even stronger
(If I don't make any sense here, I'm tired and I aplogize...)
Thanks so much for writing this up, Ray!
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 7:00 am Post subject: Second draft for comment
"This release of NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a very welcome development," explains Ray Saunders, Director of Information Technology at the World Scout Bureau, based in Geneva, Switzerland. "Minimising total cost of ownership is obviously important to an international voluntary organization, such as ours; however, the real benefits lie elsewhere. With NeoOffice/J now integrating OpenOffice.org seamlessly onto our Macs, our users here have joined the growing numbers worldwide who are very happy to work with the only truly multi-platform, multi-lingual office suite around.
"Migrating our users and their documents to NeoOffice/J has been straightforward. In fact, generally easier than I expected it to be! Visually, NeoOffice/J is very similar to what we had before - just a few items in different menus and some functions in Calc will have different names from, for example, their Excel equivalents. On the whole, we've found what we needed to know either in the Help menu or in the manuals available from the OOoAuthors.org documentation project.
"If I had to single-out one factor as having contributed most to our migration, it would be NeoOffice/J's use of the existing native Mac OS X fonts already installed in your systems. That meant no font substitutions required when converting our old documents to the OpenOffice.org format. Of the hundreds of legacy word-processing documents we've opened, only a very few have required any attention to formatting discrepancies.
"We're now beginning to play to the strengths of NeoOffice/J, including its logical use of paragraph and page styles. For example, basic newsletters for which we would previously have only considered using desktop publishing software are now being prepared completely in NeoOffice/J. Once a styled template is ready, using NeoOffice/J greatly simplifies and shortens the production cycle while maintaining realistic standards and enabling more users to see their projects through from conception to realisation.
"I hope our experience can serve as an encouragement to others. We have begun the process of demonstrating to our 28 million Scouts worldwide that switching to open-standards based software is a genuine commitment to breaking down the artificial barriers that can exist between peoples and, ultimately, to building a better world."
As before, your feedback would be helpful. Is it too long? Is this hampering the impact? Your thoughts, please. _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
The way I see it, Ray's story is going to be the "central" piece of our "testimonials" section, partly because it's a good one and partly because Ray was convenient to contact and has been a good sport about the matter So I don't see "long" as being a problem in an abstract sense, as this will likely be the most detailed story we'll have.
I don't think it's too long the focused sense, either; we'll see what others say.
On the other hand, the section about fonts (plus waaay too much time staring at the Announcement and the Press Kit this weekend) has made me realize the absurdity of some of our "selling points." They're not absurd if you're familiar with the state of OOo on the Mac, but what other new Mac app makes a claim "uses your Mac fonts"...that's a standard, expected, almost sine qua non of being a Mac app We have lots of stuff for the OOo crowd in our release, but not so much (other than "it just works" and "it's free and free (libre)") for the MSO crowd.... This has no real bearing on Ray's draft, other than the fonts tie-in...I'm rambling a bit mentally again....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
On the other hand, the section about fonts (plus waaay too much time staring at the Announcement and the Press Kit this weekend) has made me realize the absurdity of some of our "selling points." They're not absurd if you're familiar with the state of OOo on the Mac, but what other new Mac app makes a claim "uses your Mac fonts"...that's a standard, expected, almost sine qua non of being a Mac app We have lots of stuff for the OOo crowd in our release, but not so much (other than "it just works" and "it's free and free (libre)") for the MSO crowd.... This has no real bearing on Ray's draft, other than the fonts tie-in...I'm rambling a bit mentally again....
Well, for the MSO folks we have that:
*it is free
*it support many more languages
*it has a logical style system
*it reads Corel Wordperfect files
*it doesn't crash as often (thought that is difficult to advertise)
Come to think of it, we already made this list... _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
All times are GMT - 7 Hours Goto page Previous1, 2, 3, 4Next
Page 3 of 4
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum