[Zope] A Tale from IBM land...

[Oliver Bleutgen]

> Chris Withers wrote:
>> For example, if they sell a "solution" that envolves IBM hardware, M$ and
>> IBM licenses (say 40% total value) and then their consultancy for
>> development and customisation (ie 60%), they're only actually adding 60%
>> value to the relationship.
>>[..]
> This is unfortunately also a two-way street.  Often companies *dont
> want* to offer 100% of the value.  People feel comfortable buying things
>>from companies that sell MS or IBM, becuase they perceive that MS or IBM
> will be around for a while, and "nobody ever got fired for buying
> [insert solution here]".  The 60% company can go away and they won't be
> out of business.  Thus that 40% is very important to them.

And I guess that 10-20% of that 40% are again invested for marketing
from companies like IBM or MS. So the VAR knows he doesn't really 
lose all the money he pays for the software, instead it's used
to generate marketing pressure and other goodies (take Chris'
"IBM certified for e-Business" example).
They get nice developer conventions and other things, all
of that is done to suggest a spirit of success and to 
show a common goal.
All in all it might not be _that_ easy to persuade VARs to use
OSS.

> The customer doesn't realize:

>  1) That open source makes that argument largely irrelevant.
>     But we don't really have the marketing muscle to fight this
>     battle, at least where it needs to be fought.

>  2) That there are hundreds of consultants familiar with Zope/[insert
>     other open source solution here] that can take over that 100%
>     when the one who sold it to you goes out of business.  This
>     is also a marketing problem.

These two point are IMO only sufficient to get a tie in 
the battle zope vs [proprietary offering from MS/IBM] - if any,
because for every zope consultant there are 100 (or 1000)
notes/asp etc. consultants.


> Grassroots, "line-level" employee support is most of the support that
> open source has got, and that's its marketing engine.  The engine has
> been incredibly successful.  More successful than anyone could have
> hoped.  But it's still a fact that people don't like to buy something
> they haven't seen on TV...

> Think of a high-level executive making a decision about buying a content
> management system like a foreigner on a business trip in a strange
> land.  Everyone is bugging him to eat at their restaurant.  He
> recognizes none of the names of these restaurants, and doesn't really
> even understand what kind of food each restaurant is selling.  But then
> he sees the McDonald's "golden arches" (MS/IBM).. and he knows that.  He
> knows McDonalds isn't the best food, but it's a safe bet in a foreign
> country when all he wants to do is eat and move on.

> You need to understand this mentality to successfully sell open source
> software to the OSS-unaware.  You need to produce the soundbite version
> of what a particular solution can do for the company, and don't get
> religious about it, just compare the features and the prices of the
> "McDonalds" solution to the OSS solution, and let the folks come to
> their own conclusions.


I think one has to differ the types of potential clients, and
they are not always recognizable by the size of their company.

1. Nearly no technical knowledge, don't know words like 
"application server", know names like IBM or Microsoft, but
only MS is more familiar because they use their desktop OS
and office applications. 
Their motivation is to either
a) Get their first web-presence
b) Revamp their existing (static) web-presence because they
think its to ugly and/or they want to get new functionality
like putting in content by themselves.

2. Some IT knowledge, they have already a web-presence but
got burned (their agency charges the big bucks for just
changing telephone numbers), and are critical because of that.

3. Good IT knowledge, are able to do a lot by themselves,
often just lack the time or design capabilities to
do their own web presence.


Only types 2 and 3 will question the choice of the
underlying plattform. And it's often not the decision
 makers who will do that, but the IT personnel.
And it helps a lot to first try to gain ground with
the decision makers, because an open minded (because
his boss told him to be open minded) IT expert
can really be persuaded to see zope's strength.

This gets me to the point of my drivel:

What do others think of the idea of a glossy
brochure (like 4 pages) which can be used as
a handout about zope for decision makers?
Nothing academic, just pure marketing speak.
Heavy on buzzwords, short on (technical) information, 
but nice to look at.
It should be downloadable from zope.org as a photoshop
document, with layers etc. fully intact.
Perhaps with some blank space (one page), so that
everyone could include company specific information, 
perhaps not.
Then everyone who wants to could just use that to
produce zope-specific marketing material.
Mind you, I don't want to say that DC should produce
that, I guess more people in this list have graphic
designers in their company.

cheers,
oliver