[Zope] SmartWorker

[Jay, Dylan]

well said.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Phalen [mailto:zope@teleo.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 1999 03:31
> To: zope@zope.org
> Subject: Re: [Zope] SmartWorker
> 
> 
> [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.
> 
>