Patrick Phalen wrote:
Every corporation in the world with any foresight is now formulating its strategy for getting its business on the Internet. Within a year, most of them will have chosen a course. The majority of them will allow themselves to get seduced into a lockin platform environment, of the Allaire, Vignette variety. Why? Because these platforms have market
I spend all my time now talking to people that have looked at Vignette et al. and are eager to do business with us. The reason is simple: they'd rather be in control than be controlled. But at the same time I realize that these folks represent the highly-enlightened minority. And I do fear mightily for what you discuss in this email. Thus you've successfully flushed me out of seclusion. :^)
share, deployable marketing strategies, trained business development teams, large established clients they can point to, slick documentation and aftermarket support. Like it or not, these are the ingredients that buyers look for when they make a purchasing decision that their job security hangs on. Where does Zope fall down in this mix? Primarily in providing clear positioning to prospective new users.
No kidding. Unfortunately there isn't a clear answer. I'm certainly open to suggestions.
Of course, Zope users know that these other users will probably come to
Ironically if you did a survey of Zope users, most would probably say the same tale of woe. "I found out about Zope, downloaded it, worked like hell to understand it, then the light bulb turned on."
regret their choice down the road when the platform runs out of steam, but by then they'll also likely put up with any sort of delay and kludge from their platform providers, just because of the pain of making a switch. Microsoft and Oracle have both profited from this kind of inertia.
I'd like to suggest we should all, as a community, take a fresh look at the front door on the Zope web site and suggest improvements to make sure that new prospective users can get an *immediate* grasp of Zope's unique "selling" propositions.
This is a very, very important thread to me. I'm looking for two things: o What questions should the Zope.org home page, and pages one click away, answer? o What are some effective ways to answer those questions? --Paul