I, too, always (mistakenly) associated marketing with advertising. Our new VP Marketing has shown me that serious marketing is about, who would have guessed?, understanding the market!

How big is the market? What does the market want? How do we communicate with the market?

These, and many more similar questions, are the true value of quality marketing.

However, you’re right all around. One of my first concerns is: “Is it simple to setup?”

The common answer is: “No, you have to finetune a lot of details and…”

It doesn’t matter. One of the first rules in interaction design is: “The default is king: give the best possible and the least error-prone default.”.

This applies not only to graphical user interfaces, but also to command lines, code, setups, anything!

Anybody wondered why “make” works well? 🙂

A recent example:
git daemon –verbose –export-all –base-path=.
vs:
hg serve

What’s simpler? 🙂

I think that this simplification process triggers a lot of things: if you’re making a screencast of your product, do you think it’s good if 50% of its time is dedicated to explaining the setup process? We can program, let’s program a setup script! 😀

I’m not so good at technical marketing, but I’m trying to improve, starting also from those things… that help everybody and not just the screencast… 🙂