[Zope] SmartWorker

[Patrick Phalen]

[Oleg Broytmann, on Tue, 26 Oct 1999]:

::    Web Developmnet Platforms? Aren't there a little too many of them? :)


Perhaps. But it would be foolish to believe we've even begun to see the
explosion of offerings in this category.

Just this morning, Marc Andreesen announced the launch of his new
startup, Loudcloud, addressed at providing enterprise technologies for
getting business logic on the web.

Saturday, a new e-group was formed to develop an open source XML-XSL
server-side replacement for RDBMS/OODBMS solutions
(http://www.egroups.com/group/xml-server/).

IONA just announced a new suite of applications which are entirely
standards-based -- CORBA, EJB, Java2, Enterprise Edition, XML, SOAP,
HTTP (http://www.iona-portal.com). This one is particularly clever,
simply because Enterprise IT managers, as a class, tend to be very
conservative. They gravitate to standards-based solutions, since these
tend to be "job-preserving" for them. I'd expect to see more solutions
built on this model.

Unquestionably, Zope has the right underpinnings to allow it to evolve
to accommodate just about anything the future might throw at it.
However, I think it is time to give some thought to repositioning Zope
from a strictly marketing perspective. Trout and Ries wrote a marketing
classic, _Positioning, Battle for the Mind_, about this subject. Simply
put, when a product category gets crowded, marketers need clear
communication of product positioning to gain mind share. No marketer can
hope to be all things to all people. No marketer can hope to battle
Microsoft and IBM on the "everything in one box" turf.

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
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.

Of course, Zope users know that these other users will probably come to
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.