Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’ve been curious about the Nokia N770 tablet since it was originally announced, and this afternoon I decided to take the plunge and order one. The ordering process was nice and smooth, and (unlike a lot of online shops) it allowed me to have my parcel delivered to the office. This is a real boon here in South Wales, where it’s typically a 30-50 mile round trip down to Cardiff (or Newport) if you have to pick the parcel up from the courier’s office. Ticked the box to have the tablet delivered sooner rather than later. Received the confirmation email very quickly. So far, so good. Turned out to be too good

Later this afternoon, I received this email from the folks who handle their outsourced supply chain:

From: Nokia <nokia@europe.pfsweb.com>
To: Nokia <nokia@europe.pfsweb.com>, STUART.HERBERT@gmail.com
Date: Jul 26, 2006 2:57 PM
Subject: your Nokia order XXXX

Dear customer, 

We thank you for placing your order on Nokia.com. 

Our security check has noticed some inconsistencies between the country
where your credit card has been issued versus the bill to country
specified under your order. 

We therefore kindly ask to provide us with all the references of the
issuing Bank of your credit card like the name of the Bank, the complete
address and the telephone number. This is what we do need to be able to
finalize the validating process. 

Please note that without any answer from your side in the next 5 working
days, your order will be cancelled from our system. We thank you for your
understanding. 

Thanks beforehand. 

Yours faithfully, 

The Nokia team

You don’t expect a major international company (or, in this case, their representative) to be asking consumers to send information like bank account details via the reply button, not in the year 2006 Fortunately, they’re not asking for the actual credit card number, but asking for the issuing bank details isn’t exactly risk-free either. And why via email? To place the order, you have to provide a telephone number as part of the contact details. If the telephone number isn’t there so that a customer can be called to query an order, then Nokia don’t need my number - and under UK data protection law, companies are not allowed to ask for information that they do not need.

The other odd thing is why are they asking me about my billing address? Why isn’t that being handled by their merchant bank’s system (which would be able to verify that yes, both my bank and my home are in the same country)? Makes me wonder if they’re actually handling card-not-present payments by hand, instead of via an automated solution.

Before I saw this email, I was really looking forward to receiving my N770. Maybe it’s the hot weather, but now my enthusiasm for this purchase has taken quite a knock. I can’t find contact details on Nokia’s website for a customers complaint department, so I’ve sent off an email to their customer services department asking for the right contact details, so that I can make a formal complaint. I’m sure that, by doing so, at the very best it means that I won’t be getting my N770 as quickly as I’d hoped.

By contrast, I placed an order w/ Amazon this afternoon too. So far, they haven’t sent me an email asking me for details about my bank, and nor would I expect them to It’s amazing the difference when you contrast a firm that understands customer service and online selling (like Amazon) against one that (so far) I’m not having the same high-quality experience with (Nokia).

It’ll be interesting to see what Nokia Customer Services say, and how long it takes for them to get back to me.

I guess you could also call this blog post “Why _is_ Gentoo so poor at PR?”

(This posting was inspired by a look at on the experimental (and therefore probably inaccurate) Google Trends tool).

According to the subset of queries that Google Trends currently runs off …

1. Interest in Gentoo has peaked, and is now in decline
2. The decline began when Ubuntu overtook us on getting news headlines
3. Gentoo sucks at generating news that anyone else is interested in

Those statements are definitely inflammatory, but are any of them actually true?

Let’s start by looking at how useful Google Trends is. Google Trends can’t tell why someone is searching about Gentoo. There’s no way to break things down, and separate out queries from folks interested in Gentoo vs queries from folks already using Gentoo. It doesn’t take into account queries about Gentoo-derived distros. It can’t tell me whether folks were googling for Gentoo Linux (our distro), or gentoo penguins.

The only things that it tells us is how often folks are googling for the word Gentoo over time.

Even taking all that into account, tho, it can’t be a co-incidence that the downward trend for searches including the word Gentoo co-incided with the release of Ubuntu 5.04 (which can be seen more clearly on this Google Trends query). It also co-incided with the time that there started to be more news about Ubuntu than Gentoo.

Which leads me to the question that I’ve started this blog entry with … why is there more news about Ubuntu than Gentoo? Take a look at this graph, which looks at trends just for Gentoo. Now, there’s no scale at all on the ‘News’ section of the graph … but we don’t really need one. Look at the peaks. Apart from when Daniel joined Microsoft, the peaks aren’t particularly big (compared to the background noise, which seems to be bumping along close to zero). It appears (and this is no surprise to folks inside Gentoo) that we have a problem with our PR. Apart from releases (which I believe Chris handles personally), it looks like we practically don’t have any PR.

Why should anyone care? Because, if the trend continues, by the end of 2006 there will be no more interest in Gentoo than there was three years ago; and there might even be less interest.

Is Gentoo PR the problem here? (Now we’re firmly into personal opinion land. Post your own at the bottom of this entry!)

• Looking at our PR, it doesn’t appear to be fit for purpose. According to the Gentoo PR Project page, it currently has no leadership (SeJo quit Gentoo recently, and I’m told he was head of PR for a short time), and is focused only on creating presentations for developers to deliver. i.e. it appears to be inward looking, instead of outward looking.
• We have historical problems around posting news articles on the Gentoo homepage, and through the Gentoo-Announce mailing list. Only a small (and undocumented!) list of folks can do this. At the least, this creates a bottleneck. Mostly, it means that everyone doesn’t bother, because it’s easier to not post there.
• There is no RSS newsfeed on the Gentoo homepage. If you look in the page source for the homepage, you can discover that the Gentoo RSS newsfeed is here, but how many folks are going to do that? A quick search through Google for recent Gentoo headlines shows that not many folks syndicate our news.
• It wouldn’t matter if they did. Over 60% of the Gentoo news items are announcements for editions of the Gentoo Weekly News. This may actually be responsible for what Google Trends reports about news about Gentoo. Instead of releasing lots of news regularly, we batch up our news into weekly chunks, and then toss it out via GWN. Another quick search through Google suggests that GWN is syndicated even less than the Gentoo homepage; but that doesn’t take into account sites that republish the content instead of simply syndicating it.

I’m firmly of the opinion that Gentoo needs to make some changes here, to improve matters.

• Scrap the GWN in its current form. Don’t tinker around the edges. Bin it. Instead of GWN publishing new content each week, change it so that it only publishes links to news that has already been published somewhere else. Make GWN a weekly news summary - not the weekly news publication that it currently is. This would also have the huge advantage of reducing the amount of work involved in publishing the GWN, which might help improve its punctuality
• Put an RSS link on the Gentoo homepage, and do something about the news that’s published there. No point in fixing the missing RSS link if the site’s only carrying news that would put a caffeine junkie to sleep …
• Build a Press Room section on www.gentoo.org Let’s give the press a section to help them get into Gentoo - and into covering Gentoo better.
• Build a ‘Getting Started With Gentoo’ section on www.gentoo.org Our homepage is a nasty cluttered thing, and its content is not focused on immediately helping folks who are looking at Gentoo for the very first time. There’s plenty of cruft on the homepage that can make way, after all.

But the most important thing I think Gentoo needs to change is it’s total lack of recognisable senior management. Okay, so the PR project has stumbled, and needs some serious help to sort things out. Shit happens, and no-one’s to blame (we’re all volunteers, and we all have other things in our lives that are more important than Gentoo) … but why is there no-one keeping an eye on our core operations (Bug Wrangling, Developer Relations (our HR team), Documentation, Infrastructure, Package Management, Portage Development, PR, Release Engineering, and Security) and making sure that these projects are all running smoothly and delivering the services that Gentoo as a whole needs?

This is a failing of all Gentoo staff (devs, doc people, infra, forums, etc etc). Too many ostriches happy to bury their heads in their own personal sandpits, and neither follow (nor care) about the bigger picture. Problem is, if everyone behaves like that, the whole structure will fall apart eventually.

Unless that’s sorted out, Gentoo’s decline will continue.

What’s the best way to sort this out? A single dictator? A “council of elders”, staffed with an unelected cabal of “senior” developers with a long and established track record? Change the focus of the existing elected Council (some would say give them a focus for the first time), and measure their success against the health of the core operations listed above? Or build a new organisation on better foundations, and steal Gentoo’s users from it over time?