Archive for February 2008
Outstanding Plone Perception
First of all this post is not about “facts”, is about “perception“. And perception in the job of marketing is what matters the most.
The story is about several similar comments I had recenlty during presentations of Plone to well prepared, big-project consultants and technical leaders.
After a one hour standard presentation (Plone, Plone Demo, some tough Questions and Answers) the main comment was:
“Plone seems to me a diamond point, beautiful. It probably stands out above the best OSS Java CMS, but seems isolated to me, because it’s not Java.”
I just want to pin down a few thoughts here:
- In a short presentation is it possible to show the power of Plone, and have a very positive reaction (beautiful!).
- To many respects Plone is perceived as above, as excellence, as outstanding.
- The main competitor for big projects being: Java, as a whole. Python is (surprisingly?) the most discussed topic after this important consideration.
- Isolation is the main concern and has three main dimensions: the language, the (Java) standards, vendors (or human resources).
A final though… Python is for me one of most lovely parts of the success of Plone, I have to be prepared to tell the Python story and investigate the “isolation” concern.
To do that a good starting point could be You Used Python to Write WHAT (by Martin Aspeli). In particular going deeper into the “Sometimes, interoperability concerns can dictate a particular platform, but nowadays, interoperability is commonly best achieved through XML interchange, shared SQL databases or Web services” argument.
First PSPS Outcome for me
The Plone Strategic Planning Summit has been a great experience! (see Martin’s blog post for a debrief report)
It has been amazing, amusing and challenging a lot. In fact we did in incredible amount of work which unfortunately I don’t know how to use, yet. All of the main questions that I had before the Summit are still unanswered… and that’s the way it should be!
In fact the Summit has been a first step, an approach, a kickoff for in a very difficult path: strategy of an Open Source Project developped by an Open Source Community.
Thus the very first outcome for me is the motivation I received to start this blog and possibly renew my involvment in the Plone Marketing.
In fact after the Summit I feel the questions on Plone Vision are even more important than what I thought, and the answers more difficult to share than I expected, while on a shorter term Plone will nontheless benefit from the tasks & champions actionable results.
A big thank to every person that made and made-possible this event.
