Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

If Open Source is the future of software
Open Source marketing is the future of marketing
Open Source tools are the future tools of marketing

- Competing against the Enterprise Software Goliaths

I was lucky enough to be the first employee of Documentum in Europe in 1993. After seven years of learning how to cross the chasm and get Geoffrey Moore religion there was a lot I knew in 2000 that I wished I’d know when I started. The Open Source world seems to be moving so fast there’s a lot I know now I wish I’d known when I started at Alfresco. Having worked for enterprise software companies since the 80’s in engineering and marketing it is interesting that some marketing rules that you have lived by just don’t hold true anymore – and some still definitely do.

I was speaking to John Newton about the new shape of companies and the new way users select software and it became obvious that this had a massive impact across development, marketing, sales, service, support and product marketing. One of the great things about the open source community is people are ready to share ideas openly. Here are some thoughts.

Over the coming weeks I’ll write up in more detail each of these rules – why I think they’re important, and how I’ve experienced them in the real-world.

Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing

Rule 1 Strategy - Know Who you are competing Against – Geoffrey Moore
Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm pointed out that when you start in a new market you compare yourself to the old way of doing things. The competition is proprietary vendors not other open source companies.
Rule 2 Strategy - Attack the Weakness in their Strength – Trout and Ries
The strength of traditional enterprise software companies is their size - salesforce, marketing budget, customer base. This is also their weakness. It is a high cost infrastructure and people tend not to trust big budget adverts or sales people. Open source is about trust - open about what you have and freely allowing people to try it. Hence, open source marketing is trust based marketing.

Rule 3 Strategy - Discontinuity is King – Geoffrey Moore
Geoffrey Moore put discontinuities at the top of the agenda for all chasm crossers. The discontinuity in open source is cost. However, that alone is not enough. The cost of the infrastructure to deliver open source is also key, as are the tools to support trust based marketing vs. big budget marketing. Also, this discontinuity is occurring in a tornado.

Rule 4 Strategy – What is the Barrier to Entry - Geoffrey Moore
Geoffrey Moore talks about barriers to entry to a market. Open source is slightly different in that the market is there and there is a more cost effective open source alternative. Traditional enterprise software will struggle to move to open source as their strength is their weakness. They can’t overnight change their business model (remove the sales force) or as effectively use new open source technology (rip apart their un-pluggable proprietary code and architecture).

Rule 5 Marketing - Open Source is a Parallel Universe to the Commercial World
Open source is not about Linux or Eclipse or any one product. Most enterprise software is used in conjunction with other enterprise software. Open Source is a parallel universe and just as enterprise software companies partner with each other, open source companies must.

Rule 6 Marketing – Users have a New Discovery and Acquisition Process
Enterprise software is now discovered and purchased in a different way, through the web, blogs, RSS, keyword search and word of mouth. Users “Discover”, “Find Out More”, “Try/Download”, “Join Community/Buy Support”, “Use”. This has a big impact on marketing.

Rule 7 Marketing – Open Source Companies have Different Key Performance Indicators
This new process means the following are critical:

1. Mindshare – people need to know about you and discover you
2. Trials and downloads – it’s about becoming a standard
3. The Community – Collaborative development, testing, translation, support, knowledge sharing is how to beat large slow software companies

Rule 8 Marketing – Open Source Companies need to Share Ideas and Resources
In rule 1 I discussed that the real competition are the large software companies. To compete against these goliaths open source software companies should work together and share resources.

Rule 9 Operational - Your Software Infrastructure is Key
Open Source may not be about sales people but it is about software infrastructure. The volume of people downloading your software, asking questions, accessing your website, accessing demos, trialling the product, discussing in forums, updating the wiki … is massive compared to a traditional software start-up. This infrastructure needs to support new processes – when 100,000 people download your software how do you identify those that want support, patches, updates for a mission critical environment and those that want to use the open source product as part of the community.

Rule 10 Operational – We’re in a Tornado – Geoffrey Moore
Geoffrey Moore invented the new hi-tech software marketing model and became synonymous with the chasm. However, the tornado is where you want to be. That is where open source is and Moore’s rules are absolutely right. One of the many perspectives is “product” where it is about:

Standardization, standards, reduce complexity and time to deployment

That’s why I think it is important to focus on Simple Open Source – Simple to Install, Simple to Use, Simple to Scale-Out - to enable rapid mass adoption and counter the FUD from enterprise vendors that open source is “much too complex for most people”.