… the more they stay the same :-)

Gina Trapani: “This morning Microsoft’s web servers fell to their knees under the pressure of constant web page refreshes by enthusiasts who want to volunteer their time to test Windows 7 after Steve Ballmer’s announcement the download would be available at noon today. […] Is it fantastic that Microsoft is offering this freebie preview? Yes. Is it shameful that they’d be so woefully unprepared for the demand it would draw? That also would be a YES.”

(Yes, I know, this post has nothing to do with the last one, but I couldn’t resist the title.)

Microsoft has some serious image rehabilitation to do after Vista, and they seemed to be well on their way with all the positive buzz around the Windows 7 beta that found its way onto BitTorrent last month. As El Reg noted, Microsoft turned an uncharacteristically blind eye to the leak (“oddly, Microsoft, which grumbles loudly and often about the ‘illegal’ distribution of its software, remained pretty quiet on the whole affair”); I’d go a step further and suggest that, in a deftly 21st century fashion, it was likely behind the leak in the first place.

So it was no great surprise when Steve Ballmer announced during his CES keynote this week that Microsoft would be opening up the beta to the general public, or at least to the first 2.5 million people who downloaded it. Create demand by capping the number of people, keep the buzz going, and, as Gina says, get a few million enthusiast beta testers for free. How open source-y. Microsoft is finally started to get it, I thought.

Now I’m not so sure. I’m inclined to be charitable though: Perhaps Microsoft just underestimated how effective this technique would be in creating demand. Even I stuck close to the computer yesterday, eager to get my hands on the beta (I’m mostly curious to see how they’re interweaving Windows and their cloud stuff).

I’m sure that Microsoft will get it right next time, and that they’ve learned a valuable lesson from all this. As for me, I’m still clicking reload, just not quite as often.

Sun acquires Q-layer

Sun: “Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds…”

Early adopters and IDEs (integrated development experiences)

Tim Bray: “[H]ere it is nearly thirty years into my programming career and I’m still debugging with print statements.”

Heh. Same here, though it’s only been 25 years for me (wow, “only” 25 years?).

The lesson here is that old habits die hard—and that different segments of the developer community have vastly different expectations and preferences when it comes to tools. Case in point: Despite all the advancements in tools over the past decade (and despite the fact that I ran marketing for NetBeans at Sun for one of those years, and that I’m a big proponent of an IDE centric “connected developer” approach for Sun), my “IDE” of choice is still a combination of command line tools and Emacs.

Indeed, as I’ve learned over the years, this presents an interesting challenge for platform vendors. While grassroots momentum in the early adopter community is key to building a successful platform these days (think Linux, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services, among others), and early adopters will put up with a remarkable amount of pain to target these platforms (Linux, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services developers have largely relied, at least in the beginning and in many cases still today, on command line tools), what I call “integrated development experience” is key to taking these platforms to the mass market—and indeed can be an immensely powerful competitive weapon.

Think about how Microsoft was able to successfully leverage its Windows/Visual Studio/MSDN triumvirate to bootstrap .NET in the early 2000s, and how it’s leveraging .NET/Visual Studio/MSDN to bootstrap Silverlight today using largely the same techniques. Or think about how Apple is entrenching itself in the mobile developer community by providing dead simple drag and drop tooling for the iPhone, along with a (mostly) seamless publication and monetization vehicle via the App Store. What would the iPhone platform look like without this dead simple tooling? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of demand in the early adopter community for digital flatulence applications.

Of course, the real question for the 21st century platform vendor—one that understands that massive adoption in the early adopter community is key to success—is when to transition from a wild west, bubble gum and bailing wire platform strategy to a more neatly packaged integrated development experience. I’ve long argued that making this transition is key to taking your platform to the next level. When to do it is the real question. Too early, and you damage the limitless possibilities that make your platform so appealing to early adopters. Too late, and you expose yourself to competition from vendors that do a better job at capitalizing on the broader opportunity (and that’s best case—worst case, your platform fades away because it is never able to grow beyond the early adopters).

No one ever said this business was simple..

Reflections, resolutions

Dawn of a new year (1/1/2009)

About a year ago now, I resolved to end my blogging drought in 2008. I updated WordPress to the then brand new version of 2.3.2. I made some tweaks to my theme. I added and removed a few sidebars. I did everything but, you know, write. And after the lull of the holidays passed, I got pulled back into everyday life; and in the end, without using the first days of the new year to establish a new blogging routine, the only entries I managed to squeeze out in 2008 were four measly little links.

This year will be different. Sure, I’ve done many of the same things I did last year. I updated WordPress, this time to 2.7.0. I made some tweaks to my theme, including a new header image based on a very cool picture a friend took backstage at CommunityOne 2008. I added and removed a few more sidebars. This time, though, I’m actually writing.

Sure, I’ll continue to post links with short quotes, often along with my own commentary (as I’ve said before, I’m fond of this technique—Doc Searls in particular elevates it to something of an art form). Note that some of this has moved to my Twitter (something I was much better about in 2008), but there’s really only so much you can meaningfully say in 140 characters.

And, so, in the grand tradition of the software industry: I’ve announced it; now I actually have to do it.

Patience

Joe Brockmeier: “The most valuable thing I’ve learned watching Fedora is this: Patience. It takes time and steady, incremental growth to build a solid community. If you’d asked me two years into Fedora’s development whether the project would succeed, I’d have been somewhat skeptical, but looking at the project five years down the road, I’m convinced.”

Order is important

Glynn Foster: “Get. Use. Learn. Love. Spread. Only then, in my opinion, can we even think about Contribute…”

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