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.
