Forum OpenACS Q&A: Marketing Defined
Marketing is _not_ just advertising/PR. It has two components, inbound and outbound.
"Inbound Marketing" involves talking to people who use a product, figuring out what they want, and altering the specifications of your product to match their needs. (Developing the "value proposition")
"Outbound Marketing" refers to the act of building awareness of your product through promotion, advertising, etc..
These are two very different activities, yet in business both are usually necessary to achieve a successful result.
There has been a great focus in this thread on Outbound Marketing -- that is, how best to communicate to the world that OpenACS exists, how it works, and documenting what kinds of problems it solves.
This is excellent -- without outbound marketing, the only way people are going to find out about OpenACS is through luck (stumbling on it) or word of mouth. WOM is necessary, but rarely sufficient for success. (Projects like Napster are the exception, not the rule.)
My big worry - for OpenACS and for virtually all open source projects that i've seen - is the almost complete lack of inbound marketing.
That is, projects are built & tossed into the marketplace with very little research done into what end-users really _want_. Instead, the people who build the projects often make assumptions about their end-users (that their needs are the same as _my_ needs), with disasterous results.
This includes successful projects like PHP-Nuke. The authors of Nuke probably said to themselves "wouldn't it be cool to have slashdot-in-a-box, that any joker can set up in 5 minutes." I doubt they asked many people if it was a good idea. They just started building and hoped that people were happy with the outcome.
In their case, they were fairly successful. They were able to intuit a need in the marketplace, and filled the need accordingly.
However, go to sourceforge and look at the projects. It's like an burned out ghetto or wasteland: most projects there have failed, or are destined to fail. This is likely because they were useful to the individual who started the project, but not all that useful to many other people. Had the project leader done any sort of due diligence or examination of the marketplace, they could have saved themselves from a public failure. Or at least not wasted their time.
What does this have to do with OpenACS?
The OpenACS was derived from a product, the ACS, that itself was the result of ArsDigita building a few web sites for a limited selection of clients (travel agencies, photography sites).
The folks at ArsDigita thought that this framework and code could be extended to _all_ types of sites. They did very little inbound marketing (focus groups, interviews, etc.) to see what people in the broader market might want or need. There was a heavy focus inward on their "product", built as a result of previous engagements.
Larger, external trends were being ignored. (Take a look at the ACS -- all that code represents something that was used in the past. There is very little that's innovative, forward-looking, or "unique" about it. This might change with ACS 5. If it doesn't, the company will have major issues.)
I'm worried that OpenACS could meet a similar fate.
Jerry's "coup", or plan for a steering committee, was actually (IMO) a somewhat stilted attempt to bring inbound marketing into the project. That is, he was asking that customer requirements (clients, end-users, other web developers) be used to drive future decisions about the direction of the project, instead of being dictated solely by the needs of the developers in the community.
I do not disagree with him in theory. Good inbound marketing improves the chances for success of any project. However, he was a bit premature for two reasons:
First, OpenACS 4 is still vaporware! The focus should be on just getting _something_ running. Don's "shut-up-and-keep-porting" attitude is probably the correct one, at this stage. Once the basics are in place, and the core product is running, then I think the inbound marketing issue should be reassessed.
Second, it's not clear to me who the "customer" for OpenACS _is_. Is it the end-user? Is it paying clients? A handful of nerds? Who is this product really being built _for_?
Once that question is clearly answered to everyone's satisfaction, crafting an attractive value proposition becomes possible, and I predict the number of squabbles will drop. The odds of building a successful, sustainable project with broad appeal rise dramatically.
rambling MBA-talk over and out.
