Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

It is important to note that SharePoint only runs on a Microsoft stack and some have speculated that SharePoint is the next operating system from Microsoft. One of the goals of the survey was to examine the influence of SharePoint and the Microsoft stack on the open source community.

Previous surveys have shown that community members tend to evaluate on a Windows laptop and in deployment the majority turn to a Linux server.

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This survey continued the trend with 64% of users preferring to evaluate on Windows. Of interest is that 91% do not intend to use Vista but instead are staying with XP or Windows Server 2003. The logical conclusion from the analysis is the open source community either deploys on Linux, or stays with the Windows operating systems it has, not moving to Vista.

You are entitling people to what they were previously denied. As I wrote in my previous post the customer knows:

• The high-end systems are too expensive and complex
• The low-end systems are low-priced but don’t meet requirements

Customers no longer have to make a trade-off. It is the power of open source that is enabling this. Open source is also about the “good guy” vs. the “big bad guy”, abusing their position of strength with both customers and competitive vendors. Your tag line needs to say this and be a springboard for your messaging that will be more campaign oriented.

As the Blue Ocean Strategy says you need to say it in a tag line.

Generically this is:

• The Open Source Alternative to (Generic Term for Expensive Proprietary Vendor without stating names directly) when there is no clear “Dark Side Gorilla”

or

• The Open Source Alternative to the specific “Dark Side Gorilla” when one clearly exists

When the market had no clear ECM leader with Documentum/EMC, FileNet/IBM, OpenText, Interwoven, Vignette

• Alfresco the Open Source alternative for ECM

When a new “Dark Side Gorilla” emerges

• Alfresco the Open Source SharePoint alternative

The enterprise software market for gorillas is becoming soup - MISO soup - Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle.

Large enterprise software vendors have a lot going for them. They have a big base, a large sophisticated salesforce, and big budgets to create a lot of noise in the market. Microsoft has a low-cost global channel with partners in every locality to explain and deliver their products.

It’s simply not possible to “out-base”, “out-salesforce” or “out-noise” MISO or even the lesser enterprise gorillas.

The big advantage of the open source model is the community and the low cost global internet distribution model. For this to work effectively your differentiation must be simple, intuitive and indisputable. You can’t rely on a sales-person having a long conversation to argue your differentiation or a long evaluation to prove your differentiation. It is critical to attack “the weakness in their strength” - classic “Ries and Trout” marketing warfare (First published 20 years ago but still as valid today.

Their strength is the salesforce and big marketing budgets. If you can get you message across simply without the need for a large expensive salesforce and large marketing budget then this becomes their weakness. The channel becomes too expensive to deliver the product. What you have is a classic open source best-of-both world’s strategy.

The best market for this is an already educated market that has been using the technology for a number of years.. The market doesn’t need to be taught what the problem and pain chain is. They know it. What they want is simple competitive based, differentiation based messaging.

The customer knows:

• The High-End systems are too expensive and complex
• 
• The Low-End systems are low priced but don’t meet requirements
• 
• But why should I choose you?

The customer has to come to the conclusion the best solution is in the middle - The Best of Both Worlds. (This is best described by John Zagula and Richard Tong in the Marketing Playbook. I’ll talk more about this in later blogs)

An example is the following Differentiation/Comparison of Alfresco, SharePoint and ECM Stack:

• ECM may be Scalable and Robust but it is too Expensive and Proprietary
• SharePoint may be Lower Cost but it is Proprietary and not Scalable

• The world needs an open source alternative to legacy ECM
• The world needs and open source alternative to SharePoint

Open Source, Scalable and 1/10th of the cost - The Best of Both Worlds

This week I saw one of the best customer webinars I have ever seen by Neil Armstrong and Tim Bergeron of Activision Inc.

When you say Activision people think of blockbuster games such as “Call of Duty” , “Guitar Hero” and “Marvel Ultimate Alliance”. For a change when I came home my kids were interested in what I had to say.

One of the things I found fascinating was how Activision had chosen to make the web site a strategic part of their marketing, creating product-oriented micro-sites supported by the company brand, but even more-so by the community of followers of the game. Five of the top twenty five software companies are now games companies and their sites represent the future of the corporate website with great, fresh, engaging, community oriented content.

When you look at these types of sites it interesting to think about “a day in the life” of the content that powers these sites:

1. Create Game Information Behind the Firewall - Create videos, stories, images, ratings etc
2. Review and Approve Behind the Firewall
3. Stage the New Website Behind the Firewall - Content is now ready for the public site
4. Deploy the New Website - Intelligently deploy content to a web server, media streaming server and content management system
5. Publish across Multiple Channels - Use simple templates to provide variety, flexibility and an intuitive user experience
6. Manage Digital Assets and Publish across Multiple Channels - Low-resolution Flash for website, High-resolution Quick Time for downloads, Automatic transformations for mobile devices - iPod, CellPhone, PSP
7. Manage Ratings and Publish to Appropriate Channels - Use rating information to match channels to the appropriate population or age range
8. Make it Scale for Millions of Users - Use load balancing, replication and clustering
9. Use Open Source - Like the leading Web 2.0 sites use Linux, MySQL, Alfresco, Tomcat and JBoss AS

Given all of this what are the benefits

• Dramatically Reduced Ad Spend
• Great successes like Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Interestingly today I read an overview of “New report Cautions on Using SharePoint for Public Websites”

Given the strategic importance of this next generation site the world should remember it needs an open source alternative to SharePoint.

Web 2.0 sites have proven that next generation websites are built on open source.

In my previous post I wrote on “A Marketing Model for Open Source”. I finished by saying

“Open source has to have a different approach to the massive gorilla software companies of today. It can’t use its dominant position to force its platform. There is a better way. I’ll explore alternative models for different types of companies later.”

I recently read an article by Mary Jo Foley called “SharePoint: the next big “Operating system from Microsoft“. In this article it says:

• “is it correct to think of SharePoint as almost like an OS (operating system)”? “Bingo.”
• “So how does Microsoft keep the growing family of business services it is introducing tethered to on-premise software”
• “SharePoint Server is the answer. Not Windows. Not Windows Server. Not Office. SharePoint.”
• “Ballmer told the Convergence questioner he was dead-on in his thinking.”
• “Ballmer also provided one of the most succinct definitions of SharePoint Server I’ve heard from any Microsoft exec. SharePoint is just like Office; it’s a bunch of point products gathered together into a suite.”

This got me to thinking about Gorillas (Microsoft) and “The Platform Play”. There is an excellent book called “The Marketing Playbook” by John Zagula and Richard Tong. It details the plays they used “during their years of spearheading the marketing efforts that drove Microsoft Windows and Office to global dominance.”

A summary of how the book outlines the Platform Play is as follows:

Market

• “Inherently the Platform Play is about defending and expanding your turf”.
• “Your Platform is like currency. It’s good to be able to print money”

Read Office
Strategy

• “Use the strongest, most broadly applicable aspect of your technology or business to seed the center of a new ecosystem.”

Read Office

• “…the field needs to be defined in a way that excludes most of them”

Read SharePoint – Collaboration, Portal, Search, Content Management, Business Processes and Business Intelligence

Positioning to Partners

• Invite partners “to joint in your little slice of heaven”
• Make sure “the risks of opposing it stay high”

Read ECM vendors pulling back from the ECM market to develop applications on top of SharePoint from fear of Microsoft.
Messaging

• “In a Platform Play you make comparisons to yourself.”

Read SharePoint version 2 a notoriously weak product
Finally

• “Platforms die when innovation dies”

This strategy can be summarized as using office dominance to expand into a new larger “uber” platform.
Wikipedia comments on previous platform expansion behaviour as follows:
“United States v. Microsoft 87 F. Supp. 2d 30 (D.D.C. 2000) was a court case filed against Microsoft Corporation on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and twenty U.S. states. Joel I. Klein was the lead prosecutor. The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and web browser sales. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft’s victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of Internet Explorer. It was further alleged that this unfairly restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store. Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Internet Explorer over third party web browsers, Microsoft’s conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with OEM computer manufacturers, and Microsoft’s intent in its course of conduct.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

Interestingly though as the book states “Platforms die when innovation dies”. In the words of Microsoft “SharePoint is just like Office; it’s a bunch of point products gathered together into a suite.”?
Innovation or new “uber” packaging?
The real situation is one of choice. Do you want to be tied into Microsoft for the whole stack of:

• Operating System
• Database
• .NET
• Portal
• Browser
• Office
• Wiki
• Blog

What about your corporate infrastructure standards and user preferences?

• Operating System – Linux or Windows
• Database – My SQL or Oracle or DB2 or SQLServer
• .NET – Java or .NET
• Portal – LifeRay, JBoss Portal,
• Browser – Firefox or IE
• Office – OpenOffice or Office 2000, Office 2003 or Office 2007
• Wiki – MediaWiki other massively used wiki software
• Blog – WordPress or other massively used blog software

We are now moving to what Geoffrey Moore called “The Stack Wars” - Get a whole stack from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or SAP.
In summary is SharePoint the killer platform or the “Choice Killer” and “Corporate Standard Infrastructure Killer”.

Open Source is the alternative to being tied to a stack.

This week BBC Radio had a feature where the Conservative Party promised to create a level playing field for open source software in the UK in an attempt to save taxpayers more than £600m ($1.15bn) a year. George Osborne, told the Royal Society of Arts “There isn’t a level playing field for open source software. As it stands, too many companies are frozen out of government IT contracts, stifling competition and driving up costs. He also announced that Mark Thompson has been advised on how to make Britain the open source leader in Europe.

The current labour government has come in for criticism for failing to promote open software, most recently in the education sectors where the British Education Communications and Technology Agency extended and agreement with Microsoft despite concerns over the software giant’s licensing and research indicating schools could save money by using open source alternatives.

As Steve Ballmer said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”

John Newton in his blog commented, “Being a British software company, you would think that the UK government would be all over Alfresco as an open source alternative to American software. After all, governments all over Europe are adopting Alfresco for document management, records management and starting to develop web sites. Local and Central governments in France and Spain have been using Alfresco for nearly two years now.”

In this radio feature Microsoft were invited to respond. What was amazing was their comment that Microsoft gave customers “choice”
So when you choose SharePoint where is the choice around:

• Operating System
• Database
• Application Server
• Java or .NET
• Content Management System
• Portal
• Blog Software
• Wiki

In a book entitled ” the Marketing Playbook” ex Microsoft marketing executives talk of Microsoft strategies and tactics and this is a classic platform expansion play (from Office) as opposed to a “choice” strategy. So this is how they kill the “cancer” with “Choice”!

More on the marketing plays next week