[Zope3-Users] Please Guido, pick me, pick me!

[William Ferrell]

On 2/2/06, Joel Moxley <jfmoxley at gmail.com> wrote:
> In my opinion, I think a little branding could go a long way.  Instead
> of renaming the entire project, call it  "Zope3 Zebra" or "Zope3
> Panther" (clearly these are horrible, but you can see where I am going
> with this).
>
> Does this make sense?  It's only a small rebrand (and the Zope3 stays
> intact) and an assembly of components that already exist.  Basically,
> you can use this occasion as a coming out party... "Zope3 is here, and
> we're for real".

I think it's a great idea.

About four years ago when I was the senior systems administrator for
an office of about 120 people, I started using Bugzilla, at first just
to track issues I had to deal with, then with my IT group to manage
all our issues and projects. It worked great within our team, but when
we branched out and said "hey, everybody, you can use this now to tell
us when stuff's broken" everybody outside our group screamed and cried
"it's free, it must suck!" and "we didn't review it, so we don't want
it!"

They honestly called in PeopleSoft and SAP to give us demos and quotes
for full web portals; the least expensive quote was for over
$100,000(!) for software that would take weeks to set up and customize
(their words, not ours) to our needs, versus using the free stuff that
was already running and working for us.

I spent about a week to reskin Bugzilla (this was before it separated
HTML from code, so it involved just wandering through code and
changing it directly), named it something innocuous, and announced it
as another alternative to PeopleSoft, SAP, and that "Bugzilla" thing.

Everybody loved it, and continued to use it for at least another two
years before someone else took over and something else got installed.

Like you said, just paint it a different color and give it friendly
packaging, and people will flock to it in droves.

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