And here are my thoughts (for what they may be worth).  I felt compelled 
to write this after reading Christos comments in the annual report.

I have been a Linux admin/user (of various distros) since 1996.  I 
looked at NetBSD back in the early days, but for a newbie it looked too 
hard.  I have downloaded and installed v2 and have been playing with it.

There is a perception problem I believe. Here are my musings on a few 
things.

1. "Of course it runs NetBSD"
Yup, true. NetBSD runs on everything, but as alluded to by Allen Briggs 
in the annual report, some of these have been abandoned.  Should they 
really be promoted?  As I see it, the people we want to attract to using 
NetBSD are data centre admins and CIO's.  NetBSD's biggest chance is to 
have it installed on new machines going into an enterprise.  There is 
also a big opportunity in migration path too.  A marketing pitch is 
being able to say to a data centre: start with i386, then move to 
Opteron AMD64 then POWER5/Sparc 64/Alpha, or whatever.  Multiple 
platforms, One OS. Then they can leverage the knowledge base they have 
developed as their data processing needs increase.  This is not an 
altogether stupid idea, Sun are doing this exact thing with Solaris 10.

But here is the challenge for a new NetBSD admin.  I have this 
(hypothetical) new P4 box with an 925X and ICH6R chipset and a bunch of 
SATA drives.  Will NetBSD install on it and work properly?  I can't find 
that out from the web site.  I have to trawl through the mailing lists 
to find out if anyone else has tried.  This is not user friendly in the 
slightest.

What about the new POWER5 machines from IBM.  Will it install / work on 
them?  I don't know the answer, and I can't seem to find out either. 
Alpha?  I get the impression that it works real well on entry level 
gear, but doesn't fully support all the high end boxes. Clear knowledge 
regarding these things is required in order to be able to recommend or 
decide upon Multiple Platforms, One OS.

Possible solution:  Web site pages that detail the LATEST hardware 
platforms and chipsets supported.

2. Reference architectures / usage guides.
MS does this: 
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/solutions/default.mspx
Sun does this: http://www.sun.com/service/refarch/
NetBSD has?

This kind of information is ideal for IT departments looking to solve a 
particular problem.  A guide matching hardware and software together for 
particular tasks.  Maybe a box to do AV/SPAM scanning before hand-off to 
an MS Exchange box for example.

Possible solution: web site pages that contain reference architectures 
and pkgsrc packages to solve each problem.  Maybe even some new 
meta-pkgs that will install and preconfigure a solution to a problem.

3. Datasheets
Thunderbird has this: 
http://www.rebron.org/mozilla/stuff/datasheet-thunderbird.pdf

Earlier this month, someone said that they were going to an event and 
wanted some datasheets to hand out.  They were referred to the advocacy 
page on the site and suggested that they update some of the sheets.  I 
would be happy to have a go at generating something like the Thunderbird 
one, but what do we put on it?  This refers back to point 1.

Yes we can talk about the clean code base, pkgsrc and the portability, 
but a potential new admin wants to know specifics (benchmark graphs for e.g)

4. Web Site
Now I know I am being a glutton for punishment here but....

I understand that the underlying structure is in the middle to migrating 
to DocBook XML.  And props go out to the www team for all the work they 
do! The netbsd.org website has been constructed by tech support type 
people not marketers. The vast majority of the information on the site 
is to do with NetBSD itself....not advocating/selling people on why they 
should use it.  I am not a marketer, but surely in the global NetBSD 
community we must know some friend of ours that is one and earnestly 
desires to do some valuable community service!  If the dev team were to 
tell the marketers what the capabilities of NetBSD were, I'm sure they 
could easily come up with something very impressive in terms of 
direction and wording.

The way I figure it, MS have spent millions on their site, designers, 
focus groups, user evaluations....  So have Sun/HP/Dell/Apple et al.  
What can we learn from evaluating their sites?  Should we set up a group 
of 5-10 people to perform evaluations on these or other sites and see 
what they come up with?  I am happy to be involved here.

Then a new web site look using css could be designed using the new logo 
utilizing the information gleaned from the analysis of the other sites 
and from the marketing people we round up.  Perhaps the current site 
could become a technical reference site.  There is no need for a 
new/prospective user to
search mailing lists for example, but this is very valuable when sorting 
out a thorny problem.

Just my few ramblings.

Regards

Joel