The Eclipse MLP Tour

The latest rage in the software marketing seems to be doing road shows on buses or trucks. The Adobe AIR bus seemed to have started the trend and now the NetBean’s guys are following up with the NetBean’s mobile. There is even a good natured competition on who has the better approach.

I would like to point out that Eclipse has had an entire trucking company for a number of years. Another great example of the Eclipse ecosystem leading the way.

However, the Eclipse marketing machine is never one to fall behind so I am proud to announce the Eclipse My Little Pony (MLP) Tour. For the next couple of months, whenever I go out traveling to different Eclipse events I plan on taking one of my daughters’ little ponies. They have a significant collection, so I hope to take a different one each trip.

Like Tim, I still have not had time to get the proper logo installed on MLP but I hope to have that done this weekend. Also, if you have a favourite MLP that you would like me to bring to an event, please feel free to drop me an e-mail.

The one thing I am worried about is that people might think this tour is about Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz, aka My Little Pony, doing a roadshow about Eclipse. Before people start another set of rumours that Sun is joining Eclipse, I can state this is not true.

Update on Eclipse Community Survey

We have over 500 responses for the Eclipse community survey. We’d like to get closer to 800-1000, so if you haven’t taken the time to fill out the survey please take the time to do it today. It should only take 10-15 minutes and your feedback will be very helpful.

btw, in one of the questions we ask which projects the respondent has used in the past 12 months. So far the top 10 projects are:

• JDT - (no surprise)
• WTP WST
• WTP J2EE Tools
• RCP - (yes I know it is not a project but we asked it anyway)
• Mylyn - (pretty impressive that Mylyn has grown so quickly in popularity
• EMF
• GEF
• VE
• TPTP
• CDT

RCP Training in a city near you

Early this summer, we announce the Eclipse RCP training series.   If you are building or thinking about building an application based on Eclipse RCP, then you might want to consider registering for one of the 4-day classes.  Classes are being offered in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Braunschweig, Brussels, Chicago, Denver, Luxembourg, Paris, San Francisco, San Jose, Stuttgart and Portland.  We have also recently added Copenhagen and Stockholm.

The companies offering these classes have significantly reduced their normal prices and if you register before this Friday, August 31 you will get an additional discount.

Open Source Business Strategy at Actuate

Open source business models and open source business strategies are always a hot topic.   Therefore, I was really interested in seeing the Actuate CEO discuss their strategy and the successes they are having by participating in the Eclipse community.    An interesting read for anyone thinking about this topic.

Stupid Marketing Trick #1

Sun has decided to rename their stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA.   These types of announcements really give the marketing profession a bad reputation.  The comments on Johnathan Schwartz blog are pretty brutal.  The Sun marketing folks really need to give their heads a good shake.

More seriously I think this comment, reflects a more important concern.  Sun has always claimed they were the steward of the Java community, now they seem to say they are Java.   I tend to think, and I think a lot of other people think so too, that Java is much more than Sun.  The power of Java is the community and the community has built Java into a successful brand; not a single vendor called Sun.

After all Sun’s efforts has made towards open source, I still have my doubts that they really understand how to nurture an open community.  Lets just hope this is a stupid marketing gimmick and not a trend.

Eclipse Community Survey

I am back from vacation and have hopefully cleared out my e-mail and blog spam.

Last week we announced an Eclipse community survey. The intention is to gather feedback from the Eclipse community to better understand how we make things better. The survey takes 10-15 minutes to complete. As an extra incentive Nokia has donated a N95 phone that participants will have a chance to win.

Please take the time to complete the survey and let us know your feedback.

Sand, Ocean and Beaches

The vacation officially starts tomorrow.  My family and I are driving to eastern Canada to spend two weeks of playing on the beaches and sand of Nova Scotia and PEI.   Be back August 20th.

Branding, Eclipse and Open Source

Thanks to Darrin for the pointer to Steve Yegge’s excellent OSCON presentation on marketing and branding. A video recording of the presentation is online.

There are three points from Steve’s presentation that I think are important to consider:

1) Branding is important and software people need to think about it. I actually think Steve gives a really compelling presentation for anyone that doesn’t already agree with this statement.

2) Eclipse is an example of a good branding. According to Steve, IBM use to have VisualAge for Java which wasn’t doing very well and then they introduced Eclipse, which now dominates the Java IDE space. [As a side note, I don't believe the only reason Eclipse did so well was the branding. The fact it was open source and technically very good helped a lot. I also don't think VisualAge for Java was doing as bad as Steve mentions.]

However, the problem that Steve points out is the everyone thinks of Eclipse as a Java IDE not something more generic as described on our home page. Zach Urlocker has also picks up on this point. Redefining a brand is not a trivial task.

3) A big challenge of the open source community is that is has no brand. Something I completely agree with. According to Steve, GPL is the default open source license but there are companies that are abusing the open source term and diluting any brand equity.

For obvious reasons, the points about the Eclipse brand are the most interesting to me. IMHO, branding Eclipse to be a Java IDE is just not an option. In a perfect world, having a narrowly focused brand is always preferred but branding also has to reflect reality. The reality is that the Eclipse is much more than a Java IDE and has been for a number of years. Trying to maintain the brand Eclipse = Java IDE would probably offend a large part of the Eclipse community.

A potential solution is we create a new brand/name for the non-Java IDE stuff. In some ways we are doing this through the different project names; think Mylyn, EMF, BIRT, Equinox. If you mention EMF to someone in the modeling space, I believe most people know what it is and have an opinion; similarly Equinox in the OSGi community. That is a good sign of a brand awareness. Not all brands need to have mass appeal but good brands have recognition with their target constituents.

So where does that leave the Eclipse brand? I actually think the answer is related to the lack of a good open source brand. Over the next couple of years, my fearless prediction is that the term ‘open source’ will have less meaning as it continues to be overused and misused. Instead people will start associating with different open source communities, such as Apache, Eclipse, GNU/FSF, Mozilla, Spring, etc. Each community will have their unique qualities and characteristics and might be known by a leading project - Apache=web server, Mozilla=Firefox, Eclipse=Java IDE. People will associate more with these communities than they do with a generic ‘open source’ brand.

Therefore, I’d like to suggest that the Eclipse brand will become known as a place for organizations and individuals to build innovative commercial-quality software in a collaborative, open manner using an open source license.

For many, Eclipse will always be a Java IDE. However, over time just like Apple is know for ‘cool design’, I hope Eclipse will be known as a community for interesting open source development.

Eclipse Marketing Symposium, 2007 Edition

For the third year, we are holding the Eclipse marketing symposium on Sept. 19 in Chicago; this is the day before the Eclipse Foundation Members’ Meeting. The idea behind the symposium is to provide a venue for the marketing and biz dev professionals an opportunity to share and learn the best practices of marketing to developers.

I have enjoyed the previous two symposiums but this year I humbly believe we have an even better agenda. We have invited two speakers to kick-off the symposium: 1) Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester Research will be presenting the results of survey he recently completed about the enterprise adoption of development tools and specifically Eclipse. 2) Michael Cote from Redmonk will be leading a session on the Do’s and Don’ts of marketing to a developer. Cote used to be a developer so I think he can speak with a lot of authority. The complete agenda can be found here.

I’d like to invite everyone and anyone to attend the symposium. You need to register in advanced and there is a small registration fee to help cover the cost of food and drink. The only caveat is that you need to be a member of the Eclipse Foundation or an employee of a member company.

EMC woos Eclipse developers with cash prizes

As reported on ZDNet, ‘EMC woos Eclipse developers with cash prizes‘.

EMC just announced their new Eclipse based tools. At the same time they announced a contest with a top prize of $100,000.

Welcome EMC to the Eclipse community. Feel free to woo away.