Metrics for Success

Lots of times I get asked about ‘numbers’ at Eclipse. Usually people want to know download numbers. I personally don’t think downloads are a great metric for success of Eclipse. To quote a former colleague: ‘Counting downloads is like McDonald’s counting the number of hamburgers served, not digested’.

To be sure we get lots of downloads at Eclipse . However, the metrics I often use are:

• 110 member companies
• 500+ committers from 30+ different organizations
• 50 open source projects
• 950+ third party plug-ins listed on EclipsePlugins

Is there another metric that we should be tracking?

btw, if pushed I say we have had 50 million downloads of Eclipse since inception. That is the last time we added up the numbers at the end of 2004. It seems to satisfied most people but it looks like we have a long way to go to catch up to the billions served by McDonald’s.

Members’ Meeting Presentation Material

fyi, I have just posted on eclipse.org the presentation material from the Eclipse Members’ Meeting held last week in Chicago.

Marketing Symposium Presentations

Just wrapping up a busy week of the Marketing Symposium and Members’ Meeting. It is always great to see face to face the people from companies working in the Eclipse community. I really wish we could do this more often but I guess we will have to wait until EclipseCon 2006.

Lots have people have been asking me for the presentations from the Marketing Symposium. I have posted most of the presentations up on eclipse.org in pdf and powerpoint format. I’ll work on getting the rest up next week.

When we first started talking about the marketing symposium, I was not sure if it would work. Would people attend? Could I convince some member companies to share some of their success stories. Well we had between 50-60 people in attendance and 10 different speakers (probably too many for the time allotted). The content was for the most part solid and so far the feedback I’ve received has been all positive.

For those that could not attend, some of the highlights for me:

Carl Zetie from Forrester had tons of slides and data on the trends of enterprises adopting Eclipse. In my opinion, Carl is doing some of the best in-depth research on Eclipse in the enterprise. From his presentation the things that stuck out for me were:

1. Lots of developers are using multiple languages and therefore are using Eclipse and Visual Studio side by side. Sounds like a C# IDE at Eclipse would be pretty cool.
2. Eclipse usage is spreading across the software lifecycle, especially for test. Nice to see.
3. Carl had some data on what are the barriers for adoption. Two things that were ranked low that surprised me were 1) lack of support (often lack of support ranks high as a barrier to adoption of open source) and 2) managing the complexity of multiple plug-ins was not viewed as a barrier. Nice to see too.

Stephen O’Grady did a great job presenting on conversational marketing. If you are struggling to figure out how to ‘market’ to developers, you need to talk to Stephen or at least look at his slides. If you are a developer, Stephen is looking for feedback on his slides. Let him know what you think. Stephen, next time you should start with the Balmer video. developers, developers, developers, developers

The lightening talks had some great content. Two things that really stuck out for me were:

1. Maher’s Massi presentation on the global distribution of myEclipse downloads. I often get asked the question ‘where is Eclipse being used’. I think Maher’s presentation demonstrates it is a global phenomenum.

2. Takaki-san from NTT Comware has two great slides in his presentation. One shows the market share of Eclipse in Japan and the other shows all the Eclipse Japanese books. Very cool. I will be using that in some of my presentations.

I hope we do this again next year.

Guidelines for Press Releases from Eclipse

When should Eclipse issue a press release and when should we not? As the number of members and projects grows at Eclipse, I am increasingly asked about issuing press releases. Therefore, I thought it would be useful to develop a set of guidelines that the entire community understands and supports. Your feedback is certainly appreciated.

In my opinion, fewer press releases is better. Too many press releases and you over saturate the press. Also, press releases do not replace good communication from each projects direct to their users and community. The success of Eclipse has been built on developers talking to developers. Nothing will replace that.

However, we do need to balance the fact that having new companies like IONA or Nokia join Eclipse is pretty significant news for Eclipse and these companies. Or the news about Eclipse 3.1 is important to communicate as widely as possible.

Let me know what you think. Send me an e-mail (ian.skerrettREMOVETHIS@eclipse.org) or leave a comment. I plan to finalize these guidelines by the end of September.

Age of Participation: Nokia Joining Eclipse

We are getting some really good feedback on Nokia joining Eclipse and proposing to lead a J2ME project at Eclipse. For me the announcement is great news for two reasons: 1) to date Eclipse did not have a strong platform for mobile development, now we will have one, and 2) Nokia wants to lead the effort and bring with it Nokia developers, code and 2 million developers on Forum Nokia. I hope we will also see some other major players in the mobile space join the effort. Pretty exciting stuff!

James Governor also makes the insightful point that this announcement is another perfect example of the Eclipse community being a platform for participation. Nokia is committed to engaging the mobile community for developing an open mobile tools platform. Similar to what is happening with the Eclipse Web Tools Platform project being lead by BEA, but includes participation from JBoss, IBM, Borland, ObjectWeb and others. Or how about the recently proposed BPEL Designer project that is proposed to be co-led by Oracle and IBM. All companies that compete in the commercial marketplace but participating together in an open source community to develop a common platform.

Upcoming Eclipse RCP Book

Today, I had a conversation with the folks from Addison Wesley about the upcoming Eclipse RCP book by Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux due October 17. They pointed out that you can actually pre-order the book on Amazon. RCP is getting lots of interest so I think this book is going to do well.

Eclipse Members’ Meeting

We are planning the next Eclipse Members’ Meeting on Sept. 21-22 in Chicago. Twice a year we host face to face meetings to update the Eclipse Foundation membership on the status of the Eclipse projects and the activities of the Eclipse Foundation. These meetings also provide a great venue for networking and exchanging ideas with other member companies.

This year we are also planning a marketing symposium. The theme of the symposium is ‘Marketing commercial products into the Eclipse community.’ The idea is to have a series of presentations and discussions that help educate and stimulate ideas for marketing products to Eclipse users. One important part of the Eclipse story is the healthy and profitable ecosystem of commercial ISVs. I hope this symposium will help the marketing professionals in member companies to better understand how they can market Eclipse based products.

We are also having a New Members JumpStart session. If you are new member of the Eclipse Foundation and would like to better understand how Eclipse is organized and how you can participate, this session provides a good overview.

If you are interested in attending, I have posted a detailed agenda here. If you think you will be attending you need to register here.

Unfortunately, to attend you need to be a member of the Eclipse Foundation. This includes Eclipse committers and employees of companies that are Strategic Members, Add-in Providers and Associate Members.

Back from EclipseWorld

I just got back from Eclipse World in NYC. This was the first year for Eclipse World and it seemed people very please with the results. They had a strong program and all of the sessions were well attended. Some of the highlights from the session I attended were:

• John Arthorne did a great job explaining RCP to a full room. I think he really opened people’s eyes to have easy it is to create RCP applications.
• The best keynote was from Patrick Kerpan from Borland. He started out saying Eclipse is going to be ‘a de-facto application platform’; acknowledging that other platforms will exist. I tend to agree that Microsoft isn’t going to back away from .Net anytime soon. He also did a great job explaining how and why competing ISVs can collaborate on a common platform. I had one ISV come up to me after the keynote and said that he now understood how their company could participate in Eclipse. I just hope Patrick keeps doing this presentation at other venues….
• Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel did a talk on using GUI builders to build Swing, SWT or RCP applications. They did an interesting comparison of Visual Editor, Jigloo and their own product WindowBuilder.

There were lots of other sessions that I wanted to see but did not get the chance. The one thing that surprised me was the interest in RCP. There were at least 4 sessions on RCP and all of them seemed to be full. It was great to see, especially since a lot of the attendees were from large enterprises.

The exhibit hall had only 14 vendors but for the size of the conference it was a good fit. For the first time, I also got a chance to see a live demo of IBM Workplace Client technology. They are doing some cool stuff.

All in all a week well spent in the big Apple. BZ Media is doing it again next year in Boston. An event I would recommend checking out.