Hi Norbert, I disagree entirely. This thread isn't sad at all; it shows how passionate this community is about Smalltalk and that people want to talk about how to share this passion with as many others as possible. Suggesting that one can do marketing without talking about marketing is, in my view, nonsensical. People are naturally free to do whatever they like, but the fact that they are having this discussion suggests to me that they are not quite sure what to do and would like to discuss ideas with others. They would like to focus their passion on ideas they believe will be successful, rather than doing whatever first comes to their minds. Presumably this discussions will involve some disagreement rather than a big love fest of mutual affirmation. "How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas?"? I find that a very very strange sentiment... Since most of use here are developers, I think we are not used to thinking about the issues of markets and messages and can therefore benefit from all the groupthink we can get. Obviously writing a CMS is *an* idea - that's by definition; but this particular idea was being discussed in the very specific context of making Smalltalk wildly popular. Do you think it will? I'm not 110% certain of anything but looking at the idea of a CMS: * there are many established players already in the market, with mindshare and a big headstart * there are probably thousands of plugins already written for the existing platforms * we are less likely to be successful precisely *because* we would be using an uncommon language * our deployment story is still poor * users of a CMS are generally not going to be users of its underlying programming language * Smalltalk is really good at modelling complex domains and CMSes (at least the popular ones) are really quite simple - this isn't an area where Smalltalk is going to give a huge advantage over competing languages The award-winning Cmsbox is evidence that you can create a great CMS in Smalltalk. But that's not the point. You don't need to read The Tipping Point to see that we would be entering a saturated market with little competitive advantage; even if we were successful, we'd have been largely targeting the wrong people. (By the way, your suggestion of attracting developers with good tools sounds like one reasonable focus. From what I've seen, good developer tools are in fact still "market breaking" - this used to be one of Smalltalk's strengths and is a perfect opportunity to borrow, integrate, and innovate...) Julian On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:
This is a very sad thread. It started with a nice idea to talk about and it became more ridiculous with every single reply. I don't understand why everybody is so 110% confident what is the right thing to do if it turns out that we are all completely clueless? How can we dare even to speak against someones ideas? We don't have tons of ideas and need to select. And we don't need _one_ idea!
Writing a user friendly CMS is not _the_ idea but it is an idea. It doesn't help to shift perspective either to the low level side, the business side or the end user side. It is an idea and it is good. Looking at the current smalltalk development than I can just state that it flurishes at least in the open source corner. From an end user perspective neither pharo, seaside, pier or FFI has a value in itself. But all of these are a good foundation to enable people with ideas to produce wonderful products. I think to do marketing you need something to show. And if we are not the ones with the market breaking ideas than we should focus building the good tools and attract developers. Good applications will follow.
Yes, marketing is good. Talking about how marketing should be done is not. Analyzing markets, building a product for it and advertize might work but it is a corporate view. Open source devlopment works the opposite way most of the time. So what is better? Isn't that dependent on the fact if you are inside or outside corporate wise. Reading 'the tipping point' is sure a good idea but I observed it made a lot of people think they know "how success works" and they just need to find any idea/product that is willing to fit in. But you can't copy success stories easily.
So we all should focus more on what we can _do_ instead of distracting the motivaton of those that are willing to do something. I'm not a professional smalltalker but I spend a vast amount of my (spare) time in a lot of things smalltalk and try to build my small business. Without having faith, love and passion I could do J2EE instead.
ranting end.
Norbert