Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Welcome, Florian. Thank you for joining us for this interview. Let's start with your role, Florian. What's your role at OpenOffice?

Florian Effenberger: I'm engaged with the open source project OpenOffice.org. I currently work there as Marketing Project co-lead and also as German marketing contact. That means that I'm responsible for the marketing in general for the global area as well as for the marketing in the Germanophone, especially the German, market.

Sandro Groganz: How did you become a marketing expert within OpenOffice.org?

Florian Effenberger: That's quite an interesting story. I had been using OpenOffice.org or - back at these days - StarOffice for years, I liked that software, and I used other open source products as well and I was interested in how these projects work, how they organize themselves and I also wanted to give back something. Then I started engaging myself back in 2004, and my first engagement was the Systems trade show in Munich. It was quite funny - I asked on our mailing lists, which were quite silent back at that time compared to noawadays, whether we will be exhibiting at Systems. Some colleagues told me that we have the option to do so - but we need someone to do this. I volunteered and asked for someone to support me, because I had no experience in marketing or in trade shows. That's how it all started... Some months later I took over the position of the Germanophone marketing contact. About two years later, a colleague asked me whether I wanted to join him for the international marketing - and that's how it went.

Sandro Groganz: And, you told me, you're actually a student? What do you study?

Florian Effenberger: I study a complete different area - I study law. There are interesting links between technology, especially open source, and law, like trademark law, copyright law and all of that - in recent discussions also patent law. It's quite interesting to combine these theoretical experiences from the studies with the practical experiences that I can make inside the project.

Sandro Groganz: Why do you enjoy open source software?

Florian Effenberger: It's mainly because of two items. First of all, of course, I started because it didn't cost anything and it is great software - but that's a very limited view, of course. Often that's the starting point, that people see a great software, they can use it - and they do so. I enjoy open source software because I'm convinced that it is high quality software, maybe even higher quality than some proprietary software. It has its own dynamics, especially the projects behind the software are quite interesting. I see that day by day when I engage myself in the OpenOffice.org project. It's not only great software, but it's also often great people. That's a combination you don't find too often...

Sandro Groganz: Do you have experience in developing open source software? Did you code yourself and, if so, does that help with marketing?

Florian Effenberger: I did it many many years ago. I guess I stopped coding about eight years ago or something like that. I'm no real hardcore coder. I programmed a little bit in pascal - things you do as a pupil. I mainly come from the network area, meaning network administering, “hacking” some scripts (but it's not more than hacking). I'd call myself an expert in IT, but not when it comes to developing. Having also a technical background helps a lot in understanding things. I think marketing should have deep links to technical issues to understand each side. You need to understand the developers, the developers need to understand the marketers. In this view, it really helps - although I'm no real developer.

Sandro Groganz: That's a good point, having developers understand marketing issues, and the other way round. Is it part of what is special about marketing open source software?

Florian Effenberger: I think that in marketing open source software - at least when I push the view on marketing with community-driven projects, you have different structures than from what a company has and you have other people. People normally, at least when it comes to OpenOffice.org, engage themselves in their free time. You don't have a strong hierarchy, you have no “boss” who pays and who's able to tell what to do - so people do things when they want to do, and people engage themselves as deep and as long as they want. This has advantages - but also has disadvantages. As for the advantages: If people go on a trade show or have a lecture, they don't get paid for it. Most of the time they even pay their own bills. That means that if people do if, they do it because they want so - by conviction. I think that's quite a difference to companies, and a positive aspect when marketing open source software.

Sandro Groganz: So, do you think that's true for open source companies? Or do you think that within open source companies there are also people who just do it because they get paid for it - and are not really convinced about what they're doing?

Florian Effenberger: Oh no - definitely not. I think it fully depends - on the open source community and on the company. We have lots of very open companies that, so to say, “live” open source, and we have also other companies that see open source is a great buzzword to use, so they just use it, while being not very open. I think it fully depends, but I guess that inside projects you have more of this openness, as normally you don't get paid in projects. There are some exceptions, but in general I think project have more openness - but that doesn't mean that companies don't have it at all, definitely not.

Sandro Groganz: OpenOffice.org and StarOffice - you have a relationship with Sun, which is a really large company. Seen from that background, what's the difference between marketing from a company and marketing within a community.

Florian Effenberger: I have to limit my view on OpenOffice.org again, but when do you marketing at a company you have fixed contacts, you have a hierarchy, you have budgets you can use, people have work times, you have fixed plans. That's not true in all parts for marketing open source communites. As I mentioned, people engage themselves mostly in their free time - at least for OpenOffice.org. We don't have any fixed budgets. We have some ways of getting money like donations, but we don't have annual or quarterly budgets that we can use. We don't have any “boss” who can enforce anyone to do something. Even our marketing contacts or project leads - although they have some level in this hierarchy - are no “bosses”. If someone doesn't want to take over a task, he or she simply doesn't. Another point is that marketing in open source communites mostly also involves marketing no only the product, but also the project. That's quite different from a company. When we from OpenOffice.org go on trade shows or do any other sort of marketing, we of course want to market OpenOffice.org - our software -, but we also want to market our community in order to get supporters or new volunteers. Sure, companies also search for new employees on trade shows, but I think not as much as communities do. We really need new volunteers, we live because we have volunteers, we exist because of them - so we do a lot of marketing not only for the product, but also for the project.

Sandro Groganz: Let's talk about Sun and OpenOffice.org a little bit later and continue with some general aspects of open source marketing. What I'd be interested in is: Do you see any major trends related to open source marketing?

Florian Effenberger: I think that open source marketing is a quite new area of marketing that still develops. When we look at the past years, there has been a huge growth in marketing open source software and an ongoing demand. When we see all these migrations and look at projects like Firefox or OpenOffice.org then we see that they are more present in the media than ever. It's a quite new area, so I think we all have to see where this goes. Everyone has to learn. I don't think that there is any “guru” who knows everything about marketing open source software and there is no single book where everything related to open source marketing can be read. Everything is still in development, and we all have to learn and to see. The trends that I've been viewing the last months - not only for OpenOffice.org but also for other major projects - are that we see a huge demand also by companies and enterprises. We get more and more connections between free projects and enterprises, which is definitely a trend: the acceptance and support grows day by day.

Sandro Groganz: You mean companies that use OpenOffice.org for custom solutions ask you how they can market their solution together with you?

Florian Effenberger: Exactly. We see more and more questions like these: “We have a product and we want to get into the market. What can we do, how can we work together? Can we do announcements together?”. This grows day by day - I see it in my inbox dialy. We receive numerous requests like these, which shows the deep appreciation of open source and the acceptance. I don't think that these companies only do that because it's a great buzzword. From what I see, and from following these developments and these projects that reach us, I'm convinced that most companies see the chances in open source and want to take them.

Sandro Groganz: Is the style of marketing an open source product somehow similar to developing an open source product? For example, if you work together with companies that want to market their OpenOffice.org solution?

Florian Effenberger: I think it also depends, but, yes, basically we have a different style of doing that. Of course, development in open source projects as the name suggests, is very open. You can see nearly everything that goes on. You don't have any closed betas or non-disclosure agreements like with big companies. The same is true for marketing. Of course we have some internal discussions on certain aspects before we go public but most of the development in marketing like developing marketing plans is done in public as it is with development and the product roadmap - so it is quite a different approach.

Sandro Groganz: Where do you see the need for open source marketing to become smarter? You said it's kind of a new approach of marketing. Where does it have to become smarter, where do you think we will learn more in the next two years?

Florian Effenberger: This goes back to the question we had before. Open source projects - at least when we take the normal free projects that we have - in the past didn't have much experience in working with companies. You always need to find the balance. The same is true for companies as well. Although I don't want to devide those two, I think that both sides - meaning free projects and volunteers doing things in their free time and not for a living and companies that need to generate revenue and satisfy their shareholders on the other side - need to learn about each other. They need to see how development and marketing is done inside a company, they also need to see how that is done inside an open source project, as these differ. I think open source projects need to get smarter when it comes to working with companies. However, companies also need to get smarter when it comes to working with projects. From what I see it's getting better day by day. Most of the companies and projects know each other which is a great development to see.

Sandro Groganz: OpenOffice.org is an interesting ecosystem from that perspective because you have Sun which you work with together, and you have the OpenOffice.org community. You also have those small to medium-sized companies I guess that use OpenOffice.org to provide custom solutions. Can you give us a concrete example on how you try to sort out things, how you market OpenOffice.org within that ecosystem together with all these participants?

Florian Effenberger: A great example is looking at the German market. We've been exhibiting at large trade shows like Systems and CeBIT for the last three years. We have a special concept, i.e. OpenOffice.org organizes the booth and we offer companies the possibility to co-exhibit with us. Service companies doing macro programming, assisting in migrations and giving trainings have the option of exhibiting with us and present their solutions. This has advantages for both sides. We do the marketing and we organize the booth. These companies can benefit from the quite well-recognized brand and name OpenOffice.org. For us, it's the advantage that for special questions, we can go to the company co-exhibiting with us and exchange contacts. We are quite successful with our concept and we will most likely continue doing that in the future. This is a very concrete example that I like very much.

Sandro Groganz: What I'd be interested to hear from you next is - which open source software company or project, other than yours, does a great job in marketing. Why?

Florian Effenberger: There are two projects I'd like to name, although there is a variety of projects that do a great job in marketing. When you look at all those Linux-focused projects like KDE or GNOME, they do a fantastic job in marketing from my point of view. Two examples I'd like to pick up is: Mozilla and Wikipedia. As of Mozilla, when you look at their recent 3.0 launch with all those release parties, or the ad campaign in a newspaper they did three or four years ago where they placed an advertisement in a well-known German newspaper, this is all quite innovative. As for Wikipedia, they may not do the same sort of marketing than we do, but they are quite successful as well. Recently, in Germany, we had a court's decision that cited content from Wikipedia. This is quite a success. Of course, Wikipedia doesn't have release parties as you would have with software products, but created such an awareness of their project and product, that even a German court uses Wikipedia for looking up things. I think that's a fantastic effort with a fantastic result.

Sandro Groganz: I also like the world record in Firefox downloads which was a nice marketing campaign. Concerning Wikipedia, how do they actually market themselves? Is it kind of guerilla marketing? What do they do to get more visible?

Florian Effenberger: What Wikipedia does a lot is to show how serious they are, that their articles are of high quality and by well-known authors you can trust. This is the main point in marketing Wikipedia. They attend other trade shows than we do, like “Frankfurter Buchmesse” (the world's largest trade show for books). This is normally not an IT show, but fits very well for their topic. So, you see, Wikipedia has another approach in marketing to reach a different and maybe wider audience than we have.

Sandro Groganz: Wikipedia attended a kind of industry-specific trade show, and that's how they market themselves?

Florian Effenberger: Yes, they have a much wider audience than we have, because even people not using the internet a lot can use Wikipedia by DVD. So Wikipedia has to see on how to target these audiences, like by attending “Frankfurter Buchmesse”. I think that Wikipedia now is being widely recognized. You have to be very careful of course, but there was a recent study that showed that in parts Wikipedia is even better than other well-known encyclopedias. That's quite interesting...

Sandro Groganz: OpenOffice.org has a really different impact in different countries, check it out with Google Trends (arguments: microsoft office, openoffice). As you can see some countries are searching for OpenOffice.org more often than for Microsoft Office, others do just the opposite. Why does this happen in your opinion?

Florian Effenberger: I think this is not specific to OpenOffice.org, as we can see such differences for other open source software as well. Just look in the news. Some countries pass laws de-facto making proprietary software a requirement, others like Germany work on being as open as possible. Let's compare Germany and Switzerland. These two countries are neighbours, but are at a different level when it comes to open source. While we have lots of activies and well-known projects in Germany - like the city of Munich (“LiMux”) or the city of Freiburg - we have less in Switzerland, although there are also a interesting projects and future plans for this country. Another example: Look at the ISO ballot voting on document standards and compare the different views of the countries. These differences only give us the motivation of doing even more and better marketing in countries where our message hasn't manifested itself yet.

Sandro Groganz: How does Sun face the 1 customer per 1000 users problem for OpenOffice.org?

Florian Effenberger: I'm not a Sun employee, so I surely can't speak for Sun and I don't have insight in their calculations and their customer base. However, I think that we have a strong and vital market for solutions and consulting on OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. According to my experiences, this market grows and grows. Sun is part of this market, so I'm sure they're very well positioned.

Sandro Groganz: How does Sun explain its potential customers why to buy StarOffice instead of OpenOffice.org. Do they so in marketing?

Florian Effenberger: Again, I don't work for Sun, so I can't speak on their behalf. We have a very good contact to lots of people at Sun and do lots of activities together when we have a chance - like joint marketing activities. Since quite a while, Sun also offers commercial support and consulting not only for StarOffice, but also for OpenOffice.org, so you can get the same level of (paid) support from Sun, no matter which OpenOffice.org distribution you use. StarOffice has some extra features Sun had to license itself from third party vendors, that's why it is being sold and not given away for free. However, it is nearly identical with OpenOffice.org, has 99% of the same features and functionality, so it's everyones choice which edition he prefers. For some special areas, Sun has offers like the enterprise version of StarOffice which comes with additional tools, or the StarOffice Server for generating documents on the fly.

Sandro Groganz: Why don't you partner with enterprise vendors like SAP, Siebel, etc. As a matter of fact not doing it you are having bad time trying to enter the enterprise market...

Florian Effenberger: “Partnering” is quite difficult with open source projects. Most of them are no legal entity by themselves, which is true for OpenOffice.org as well. Although there have been some legal entities set-up, like associations or foundations, the project isn't one. Thus, no real contracts can be signed, and apart from that, things are different with open source projects. As mentioned above, people engage themselves in their free time and there is not a real strong hierarchy. This makes partnerships with contractual obligations hard to face. Nontheless, most projects strongly work together with companies and achieve great things. Although it might not be legally called a partnership, it often is nearly the same.

You also need to be aware of the fact that I mentioned above, that also companies need to become smarter when it comes to working with open source projects. Sometimes, companies are not at the point where they want to work together with open source projects. I hope nontheless that we will work together more and more in the future, based on understanding and supporting each other.

Sandro Groganz: How do you educate yourself about marketing? Is it via books, colleagues, conferences, weblogs? Where do you get your information and ideas from?

Florian Effenberger: When it comes to me, it is mostly learning by doing. Of course, in the beginning, do you a lot of mistakes, but - you have a lot of colleagues you can learn from, you attend a lot of trade shows, conferences and such, and mostly it's learning by doing. You remember how you did it last time, check whether it worked, you look at other open source projects. Now we come back to the point we had before, where I said that I don't think there is any “marketing guru” or the “one book” you have to buy and then you know everything about open source marketing: We all have to learn. Learning brings successful and also unsuccessfull events. That's the main point in open source marketing - you gather experience, which you mostly do via learning by doing.

Sandro Groganz: Which weblogs do you read regularly?

Florian Effenberger: They are mostly related to OpenOffice.org, of course, and to open standards, like following the recent debate of ODF and OOXML standardization issues. I read a lot of weblogs by colleagues like Rob Weir from IBM who has a deep insight into these things. I like to stay up to date when it comes to open source projects and the areas that concern me in my daily work.

Sandro Groganz: Can you tell me a little bit about the ODF vs. OOXML? Did you do any marketing campaigns in that area?

Florian Effenberger: It was a quite interesting thing to follow. Most of the information I have I only have from the media. You can imagine that inside the national standards bodies lots of things happened behind closed doors. Most of the information could only be taken from the media. We have our position on this topic, we didn't propagate too much. I think that the end user doesn't want to hear, again, that one company is proposing a standard that we don't consider being good. I think that would distract users, because users don't want to get involved into these technical discussions. They want software that works, they want a document format that works and they don't want to have this “bashing” of other companies. We I stated several times our position on this, stated why we do think that ODF is the better format also from a technical point of view, but we left it at that because we didn't want to distract users by always repeating what our position is.

Sandro Groganz: Let's talk about more about OpenOffice.org as a product that you want to market. What's your latest marketing success?

Florian Effenberger: We had great success with what we internally called a “mini conference”. This goes back to the idea of a colleague of mine. We had this at the LinuxTag in Berlin, a large Linux trade show. We had two days where we had a dedicated OpenOffice.org track, with a mixture of topics: case studies by the city of Munich and the city of Freiburg - both cities that are internationally recognized for their migrations. We had technical tracks, presentations of the upcoming version 3.0. This was an interesting mixture for all audiences. We received great feedback and we will eventually repeat this, I guess

Sandro Groganz: How did you achieve this success?

Florian Effenberger: It was quite simple. A colleague of mine had this idea and she asked some of us whether we wanted to join, asked some contacts - and then she just did it. It sounds simple - but in this case, it was. Of course, it takes a lot of efforts to organize this in the end, coordinations, setting up the program, but the basic idea was quite easy like mailing some people...

Sandro Groganz: And monitoring this success was, I guess, quite simple because you saw how many people attended...

Florian Effenberger: In that case, of course. We also received lots of feedback and e-mails. When it comes to monitoring, it is pretty hard for open source projects. We often get questions like “What is your market share?” and “How many downloads do you have?”. That's no easy to track because we actually don't sell any licenses, I.e. we can't track in detail. We have some rough numbers, but they are not truly representative. Take the downloads as an example: You have five computers in your home and download OpenOffice.org five times as you have broadband internet. This is one user. Then we have a company with a thousand computers - and they do one download. So it's quite hard to track success in marketing open source software. There are some measures you can take, but it's not as easy as in traditional industries where you can see a cash flow, revenue, market share, sold licenses - all of the things we don't have. We don't generate any revenue as a project. Of course, other companies that sell services can measure these things better than we can. We are in contact with them to see how their experience is. But giving hard facts and numbers solely from the view of an open source project is a quite hard task to do.

Sandro Groganz: I'd be interested to hear what your marketing budget is like, if you are allowed to talk about it? I guess it comes from donations?

Florian Effenberger: It mostly comes from donations. We have to split up a little bit: When it comes to development of the software, most of the developers are employed by large companies, especially Sun Microsystems. That quite important part has already been dealt with. But when it comes to marketing, user support and all of that, that is mostly being done by volunteers in their free time. As OpenOffice.org as a project is no legal entity, we don't have any budget. Of course, there are some associations, like the OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. (http://www.ooodev.org) in Germany that has been founded four years ago and is able to collect donations. That's the way we finance ourselves. Lots of things are also being done by individual contributors. They travel to trade shows and pay most of their expenses themselves. There is no real budget...

Sandro Groganz: How do you ensure that the marketing objectives and also the implementation are being understood and supported by everyone in the OpenOffice.org community, or at least those who are a crucial part in it?

Florian Effenberger: We have a small hierarchy in the project. We have some so-called “project leads”. These persons are responsible for a certain area like marketing, like distribution, like user support - they are pretty well informed. They are in contact with other project leads. They need to be in touch with the release team to know when a new release is planned, so they can market it. Usually they prepare things, make some first thoughts, and then it is being communicated to our mailing lists. Then anyone can inform him- or herself and take part. Of course, there is some - let's call it “inner circle”. There are people who contribute very often and are very active, so at least these people are usually well informed. The term “inner circle” doesn't mean that other people aren't allowed to know things. There are no secrets. This just means we have some people that engage themselves more than others to, which is quite normal in such a project.

Sandro Groganz: We already talked about the Firefox 3 release and the good ideas they had with marketing it. What are your plans with OpenOffice.org 3.0? When will the release be out, when is it scheduled?

Florian Effenberger: Currently, it is scheduled for September 2nd, but you know it can be one of two weeks later. We generally say: Let's expect it in September. We want to have a stable and good release and not to target a specific date and bring it out no matter which state it has. I think the Debian folks say: It's done when it's done.

Sandro Groganz: How do you create the buzz? How do you achieve what Firefox 3 achived?

Florian Effenberger: Of course, that is still a bit of a secret. Generally speaking, we want to be present in the media - all sorts of media. Print media, web media, TV media, radio media and all of that. We want to introduce the new features in advance to show what will be there in OpenOffice.org 3.0. What's kind of important for us as well is a major feature that comes with 3.0 is that we now have a native Mac version. We see a huge demand for it. We get lots and lots of questions and requests, so this will be one focus of course, but no the only one. The rest still will be a surprise.

Sandro Groganz: Do you work together with PR agencies to address the media, like general computer related media, Mac related media, and so on?

Florian Effenberger: For the Germanophone market: No. We have good contacts to the press and we have some contacts we now in person we exchange minds and thoughts with them, and we also inform them in advance, so there is a very good information flow. On the international market we have a company that supports us by sending out our press releases and doing medai analys on that. They do this as a giveback to us as they also use OpenOffice.org and want to give back something to us. But this is only for distributing the announcements and measuring the success wherever its possible, but for the concept and the marketing plans, we all do them on our own.

Sandro Groganz: So actually journalists, you have direct contact with them?

Florian Effenberger: Yes, I think thats quite important. Especially for open source project, one advantage of marketing open source projects is that you can do kind of “honest marketing”. You usually don't have anything to hide, you don't need to sell anything. This means we have a very good contact to journalists, we talk to them honestly, we inform them beforehand when there is a new information we don't have a formal press releases of yet.

Sandro Groganz: Do you think it is easier for a community-driven project to get direct contact with journalists compared to a company-driven project?

Florian Effenberger: Not necessarily. I think it depends on how you can work with the journalists. We also have journalists we have better contact to than with others, so it depends if you can make it with the person. I think if a company is openly structured and open minded, then it is quite easy for them to get into contact. Journalists are of course aware of company only using open source as a buzzword. When these companies try to approach journalists, trying to get the word out on some topics, and the journalists see that this is not honestly, then I'm quite sure reacting will be quite difficult. It's not necessarily the case that a community-driven project has advantages in these areas, it fully depends on how you communicate.

Sandro Groganz: What is the relationship between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice marketing? Does Sun help OpenOffice.org in some way? How do you benefit from each other?

Florian Effenberger: Actually that's one of our top questions we also get asked on trade shows and conferences: What's the difference between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice? Of course, that's a valid question. When it comes to marketing, of course, Sun is a company, Sun has to generate revenue, Sun has to satisfy its shareholders, Sun has marketing people who are being paid by Sun. But we do a lot of things together. Of course, our approach and our goals are the same. Sun also markets OpenDocument format and Sun also markets the same features as we do. So we have a very very good contact to Sun and we know a lot of colleagues personally - some even became good friends. Sun also markets OpenOffice.org by their channels, and I'm also in good contact with the Sun marketing department. When it comes to marketing OpenOffice.org, most of the work is being done by the community. That's fine, because Sun - although being the main sponsor of the project - is “only” (in quotation marks!) a part of the projects. It's great that marketing efforts are being done by the community, with support from Sun. I think our goals are nearly the same, so we do in some points also joint marketing. Look at the recent announcement Sun made about the extensions functionality in OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. It's the same code that can be used in both products, so we can do a joint marketing in these areas.

Sandro Groganz: Is there some more involvement from Sun that you wish to see?

Florian Effenberger: I think Sun is doing a very great job. I really like the support they are giving to us. Of course they are welcome to contribute the most they can. But there's nothing I really miss at the moment. It's really fine, they are doing a really great job. I'm thankful to have them inside the project.

Sandro Groganz: Thank you, Florian, for answering all these questions.