When the Innovation Runs Out

One of the things about open source that bugs me is cloneware. I made the term up, and there may be a better term that already exists, but I’m talking about software that merely aspires to be a copy of one or another proprietary offering. I’ve seen this even in some pretty well done projects.

As an example, here is the description for a project called Rhythmbox:

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes.

I chose this project because I use the software daily and I hope that any offense I might cause to the rhythmbox developers will be offset by the fact that I actually really like their product. My issue is not with quality or anything like that, but with the fact that there’s this implication that the software is intended to be a clone of iTunes. The implication in this one is a soft implication, to be sure. There are far more aggregious examples that I’ll leave to your own investigation.

Now, I’ll grant that no great idea happens completely on its own. As with Isaac Newton in science, any developers who may seem to have seen further were only able to do so because they were standing on the shoulders of giants.

Now that I have given fair enough disclaimer, and with a little luck, readers will understand that I’m not ranting, but stating a potential pitfall in the open source process. So here it is, that which bugs me:
Knock-off software makes innovation the territory of proprietary software vendors, leaving the impression that OSS simply re-creates what’s already been done.

What happens when you get to that point where you have copied all the existing features? Does the process run out of gas and wait for the vendor’s next set of innovations? Of course not. Developers/hackers start innovating, stretching boundaries, etc. But there’s this perception that has been created that makes potential consumers of OSS believe that all OSS is merely about emulating that which has already been created. The development process gets discredited.

Mozilla Firefox has some great innovations that far surpass Microsoft Internet Explorer. Nat Friedman’s dashboard project, Beagle, is a good example of OSS innovation and vision possibly being borrowed by proprietary vendors. So I’m not trying to state some kind of absolute here.

But there are certainly people who think that the mission of OSS is to be the free version that puts those bastard proprietary vendors out of business. It’s a misguided sentiment, and it cheapens what is really going on in with open source.

If my point is eluding me somehow, allow me to cite the example that precipitated this blog entry. I received through a circuitous route an email full of ideas on how to improve Novell Linux Desktop. After some very good suggestions, the author–who is clearly a longtime enthusiast of both SUSE and Novell–concluded:

The easiest sell is to make the end-user transition as seamless as possible. Being that Novell and Linux will always be a threat to MS, we need to make the desktop (and assorted apps) appear as close as possible to their native counterpart. Sometimes, a complete UI interface isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Thanks guys. Remember. we’re almost there with that ultimate solution. The faster we get to market with it, the better off we are.

The author felt that desktop Linux should be a clone to Windows. Moreover, he states it’s imperative to NLD’s success. I disagree. Here is my response stating why:

Perhaps it would be good for me to share some background on philosophy that Nat and Miguel learned from early Ximian/Helix Code days:
Implementing a desktop environment that appears to be a Windows clone is a losing battle. What happens is you get an interface veneer that looks like Windows (or MS app counterpart to the OSS offering), but when you get into it a couple levels, you start finding the areas that are not identical (nor even close enough). Consequently, users end up perceiving the product as a cheaper, crappier version of Windows instead of a robust alternative to Windows. (Imagine some of the scenarios for less-technical users: I tried to install an application (Windows app) and it didn’t work! This sucks! I want the real Windows back!)
Our objective is to produce an alternative, not a substitute. So cloning Windows interfaces sends people down the wrong path. Eventually we’d like to see Linux as a very strong, very prevalent alternative client OS, able to draw people to it for its own virtues rather than merely being adopted for being a cheaper, good-enough OS.
[Name withheld] shares this desire to stick it to the man in Redmond with many Linux true-believers. I feel that it makes Linux about being “not Windows” instead of being its own thing. Novell is not doing desktop Linux as an attack on Microsoft. (That comes just as a consequence of Microsoft’s desktop dominance.) We see that Linux can become a long-term viable client platform for the enterprise, and Novell intends to be one of the companies that helps to get it there by contributing to the community effort. Cloning Windows would be a short-term strategy that would keep Linux living in the shadow cast Microsoft Windows. Novell would rather see desktop Linux step out into strong, independent roles in the enterprise.

[Nat Friedman actually gave me the foundational thinking for this response shortly after he joined Novell, so I'm not claiming that this original thinking of my own.]

The short of it is that cloning a product without actually creating any new benefit for the end user (other than “it’s free”) isn’t in itself really that compelling, and open source projects can be so much more–as evidenced by a huge number of extant, thriving projects. The idea that the purpose of OSS is merely to produce a free and open version of a proprietary software product diminishes the power of open source.

So, if you’re doing business in open source, if you’re actually commissioned to market the virtues of some open source ware or another, it’s good to highlight the differences from proprietary wares. Certainly you can discuss features as “familiar” when they truly are, but it is good to steer creating the impression that your software is pretty much the same–once you go down that hole, it’s hard to get out. Also note that that approach diminishes the hard effort and contribution of open source developers.

Stated differently, don’t expect OSS to be exactly what the world already has in proprietry software. Let’s not force hackers into being hacks.

Open Source Marketing: What it Ain’t

I recently Googled “Open Source Marketing” to see what it would turn up and found that the recent movement by Mozilla to get contributors to help sponsor a Firefox ad in the New York Times was getting some odd coverage. Specifically, one Steve Rubel recently published an online article called “Open Source Marketing is the Future - Pass It On” that seemed to overestimate this event and cast it as the future of marketing. Others have linked to Mr. Rubel’s article as though its content provided some insight to what open source marketing is. It demands some analysis.

Jumping to the conclusion that all marketing is heading this way is about as a gross an assumption as one can make. While it is groundbreaking that people would be willing to contribute money freely in order to help propagate the otherwise free Mozilla Firefox browser, this event was not actually for Firefox. You may not see this approach work but a couple more times.

The basis of this movement is people’s deep set ire with Microsoft. Were Microsoft not such an overwhelming victor in the browser wars of the late 90’s, and such a dominatingly successful company (financially), and–let’s just say it–were they not such bastards about in trouncing their competitors, and after so doing, allowing their product quality to slowly deteriorate, funding the Firefox ad would not have happened. (Firefox itself might not have happened!) What the Firefox community marketing movement really shows is that Microsoft has inspired so much spite that the public will actually pay to promote an alternate browser to Internet Explorer.

[I'll also take a moment here to point out that Microsoft argued in the media and in court that the Netscape lawsuits were restricting their rights to freely innovate and provide value to consumers. In shameless irony, Microsoft is now floating implied patent infringement threats against users of OpenOffice, as covered by the intrepid Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch.]

This community marketing efforts is likely a temporary phenomenon. Open source software (OSS) has a building momentum that is starting to turn the table on dominant market vendors. Microsoft will remain a giant for decades, but OSS will bring in alternatives. Eventually the OSS movement will have a correcting effect on Microsoft’s way of business and they will cease being perceived as so villainous. (Yes, that’s hard to envision, but give it time.)

Ultimately, Mr. Rubel’s article makes the mistake of confusing the open source software movement with being the “not the Microsoft evil empire” software movement. As a thought experiment, imagine Linux in a world without Microsoft. Would it be relevant? Would it continue to exist? My guess is that it would on both accounts, but it would be very different.

Sung a little differently: nothing helps a group hang together like a viscerally-hated common enemy. In absence of such an enemy, will the funding for things like the New York Times Firefox advertisement still be there?

That begs the question: How will OSS products be marketed once they are no longer the anti-Microsoft (or anti-whatever) option and have become more standard fare? I should think that communities will play a role, but not in such Hollywood big screen ways as the NYT-Firefox event anecdotally suggests.
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On a related note, I found the remarks of Todd Sattersten interesting. He makes the point that the NYT-Firefox event was really a community funding drive rather than open source marketing, and then goes into what some attributes of “open source marketing” would be. Mr. Sattersten’s approach to the subject would make the subject of my blog more appropriately called “Marketing Open Source” rather than “Open Source Marketing.”

Bad Press in Good Press Clothing

During the Novell Linux Desktop press tour, I frequently used an analogy to surfing for Linux on the desktop. What I would say is essentially that desktop Linux is like a wave heading for the shore: Microsoft really cannot stop it from happening, and it presents a very real threat to their desktop dominance. But a company like Novell has to be realistic about what open source on the desktop really is, and that it is not Novell. Instead, Novell is one of the companies surfing that wave and hoping to ride the wave all the way in to shore.

Let me risk belaboring the simile. Other companies have already wiped out or bailed, having caught the wave too early. Other companies may catch the open source wave too late. Microsoft surely sees that wave, and that’s why Ballmer is recently so vocal about Linux, and Microsoft is so strong on their anti-Linux FUD campaign.

Linux on the desktop has challenges still to overcome. The technology–the platform, the desktop environment, and several of the standard must-have applications–is certainly mature enough, but there are yet areas to conquer. The OpenOffice.org office suite is still not clean enough to satisfy a lot of avid MS Office users. And the ISV’s are not all on board with software (on the personal side think Quicken, iTunes, Audible.com, etc.; on the business side, it’s line-of-business applications and vertical applications). Yes, open source alternatives exist, and are growing in maturity, but I am not an idealist who thinks that open source is always the best option. Business usually want someone to back their mission-critical systems.

It’s essential for the companies surfing the open source wave to stay legitimate when talking about the software they are offering. That is especially true when dealing with a high-interest topic like desktop Linux. Everyone seems to want what Nat Friedman calls “the David and Goliath story.” The high interest becomes a breeding ground for sensationalism.

Consequently, in most of the press tour for Novell Linux Desktop, I made very clear that Novell Linux Desktop 9 is not the product that will break Micrsoft’s back, and that Linux and Windows will need to cohabitate in the enterprise environment for many years to come. That’s just common sense: Windows is entrenched, Linux is up-and-coming, and Microsoft is a very agile 1,200 pound gorilla (Yes, that’s 1.5 800lb gorillas, or three 400 pound gorillas.) Microsoft has deftly changed strategies when market conditions changed in the past.

All that said, naturally, I was disappointed to see an online article by Liam Lahey trying to make a David & Goliath story of our announcement:

Novell said it doesn’t rule out the general replacement of Microsoft Windows and other proprietary operating systems with its Linux Desktop. Most users do, but that hasn’t squelched Novell’s enthusiasm.

That is a disappointing interpretation of our announcement. Especially, since Mr. Lahey had spoken to several Novell personnel. Had someone at Novell given him the wrong idea? I sent out a note to the others he interviewed, expressing my concern about the angle of Mr. Lahey’s coverage. Ladd Timpson, Novell Worldwide Director for Channel Marketing, responded:

Indeed. It’s not the message that was emphasized by any means. He said what he wanted to say.

This shows the climate of the industry right now. We have a large vendor, Microsoft–who has so dominated the desktop and office software market, and used such aggressive tactics as to garner anti-trust lawsuits in several countries–and an emerging rival technology, Linux. People are so eager to see the story unfold a specific way that they sometimes jump to firebrand conclusions about what is really going on.

Most of the coverage from the press release and tour has been spot-on, and it’s been a very rewarding week. So, while I was disappointed with Mr. Lahey’s coverage, his approach to the article does show that even when you take what should be a very even-handed and straightforward approach to talking about Linux (or any other high-interest open source product), you should expect some media exaggeration will still happen.

NLD Launched!!

Yesterday we announced the release of Novell Linux Desktop. I was pretty excited about the release, and a little nervous about it. I find I have a lot of trepidation regarding Linux and Novell. Mostly in that I think that Novell is making a bold move embracing Linux, and I still wonder if the IT market will accept us, whether the open source community will take us as legitimate in what we’re doing.

There’s so much fear around “the Linux community” and what a touchy culture they are. That’s kind of what I have found among the not-so-savvy-about-open-source set. The general belief seems to be that they are a huge, capricious lot. But the truth is that the “they” who actually know each other and really are getting things done in the Linux space (enthusiasts, hackers, contributors and maintainers) are waaay more sophisticated than merely the mere “Live Open Source or Die” charicitures frame them to be. For example, our announcement headlined us on slashdot.org and it was soon a massive thread. The general gist of what I read in the thread–with some due noise filtering applied–seems to be: “You like me. You really like me.” We got high marks and a lot more people “get it” than I thought would. Sure there are still some cranks in the crowd, but the conspiracies they espouse are kind of fun to read.
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Outside of the open source community reaction, the response to announcing Novell Linux Desktop has been huuuuge. We announced and got coverage across the Internet, with more articles still coming in. Nov 8, 2000 marked Novell’s single highest bandwidth demand day ever as 4000 requests slammed us to download the 600+ MB ISO images. The Novell Linux Desktop landing page had 75K unique page views–the most any Novell product has ever received on its launch day.

This all happened on the same day that we announced a Microsoft settlement of $536 million for an 8 year old lawsuit. I did not know about the settlement before we announced, so I was concerned that it might drown out the NLD announcement. (Neveretheless, I took to telling everyone that the settlement resulted from Microsoft seeing our announcement and are capitulating by just handing us cash.) The settlement announcement drew further attention to Novell, and therefore Novell Linux Desktop. Some business/financial coverage of the settlement also covered Novell Linux Desktop, so we may have even gotten some unplanned exposure to the non-geek financial community.

It was a huge day for Novell. I got to be close to the center of it.

Microsoft Stooges Me

The Gartner Fall Symposium/IT Expo in Orlando, Florida is a massive Analyst conference that happens every year, attracting a few thousand CIO’s and IT Managers. The IT Expo part of the show is huge show floor of vendor booths. Novell is a regular attendee, with a large booth on the show floor.

These days I mostly go to the conference for the Analyst sessions, but I did some time on the floor staffing the booth this year and had an interesting experience. A woman from Microsoft came up to me at the booth and tried to stooge me. That is, she tried to pass herself off as a potential customer (by turning her conference badge face down) in order to hear an unbiased pitch about Novell Linux Desktop.

She seemed suspect to me at the outset, and I figured I was being stooged, but I went ahead and laid out the whole pitch as I would anyone else (after all, if my hunch was wrong…), telling her what a Linux desktop was good for, where OpenOffice performs well and where it needs work, and so on. I treated her as I would any other CIO, IT manager or person interested in hearing what Linux on the desktop is about.

Toward the end of the discussion, her badge was turned back around, and it read that she was so-and-so in marketing at Microsoft, so I asked her, “So, are you scared?” I meant this just to poke a little jest, as my pitch was really pretty even keeled and not at all “Linux is coming to kill Microsoft.” She said no, not really, and then asked an oblique question about how transactional users (that is, data entry, point-of-sale- call center, etc) might feel being given a “lesser” desktop.

The angle of her question showed that perhaps she was reacting close-mindedly, and definitely that she really did not understand the CIO/IT Manager audience of the conference. CIO’s are much more about efficiencies and optimization. They’re mindset is much more about “how do I make available the services our business needs, securely enough for our to mitigate risk, and keep costs in control?” That audience is a lot less concerned about “feelings.” (And the end users she speaks of really don’t live for their computers either–that’s a weird cultural assumption many in the IT industry apply to the rest of the world, as though we all live technology.)

Perhaps her badge was inadvertently turned around. (Some benefit of doubt may be due.) But the timing of when it was out-facing again was suspiciously “I just stooged you and I’m from Microsoft” well-timed.

This is interesting not just in that it may confirm all our pre-supposed suspicions about Microsoft personnel. (They’re devious and icky! Not really. I don’t believe them to be as evil as some would like them to be.) But it does show a cultural difference between open source marketing and proprietary marketing. I’ll tell you exactly what we’re doing, Microsoft: we’re surfing the open source wave, hoping that we don’t wipe out, and hoping to ride this wave all the way into shore. Whether Novell is on it or not, it’s coming in.

Ultimatley, it is a cowardly tactic to try to conceal who you are or what your product does. So at risk of waxing too self-congratulatory, I feel that I performed well on this, especially since the situation could easily have baited me into a more combatative stance than I took.

I did not get the woman’s name, but those who work with her would probably know who she is. She is distinctively tall–probably about 6′3″ or 6′4″. If you know her, tell her the Reverend Ted says, “Hi!”

Novell Linux Desktop Press Tour

I met with PC Magazine today. I used to read PC Magazine back in my early days in IT. As I recall, I used to devour it while I was still learning what’s what and finding everything I could learn about computers to be urgent. (Since then, my noise filtering has gone way up and knowing the latest sound chip innovation is not nearly so critical.)
The guys as PC Magazine were a good bunch. It’s funny how well so many of the geek-chic set get Linux better than I expect people to. For people outside of open source and Linux awareness, there seems to be a mystique about what open source is and what Linux is. I’m sure it’s different for each person, but the general gist of it seems to be that there’s a perception that there’s some concept that’s really difficult to understand about it–a barrier to intellectual entry, if you will. The more I work with people discussing what Novell is doing with Linux and open source, the more I start to realize that the barrier to entry a self-reinforcing non-entity that people create because its different from what they know and it’s a simple concept that has deep implications as to how the IT industry will function in the future.
Different models do not always mean complex models. I compare this to the theory of evolution. Many people do not understand it, and out of fear that there is something very complex about it, few people ever come to understand it. Like open source, it has deep implications that would change the current operating model. But the concepts of evolution are not really difficult. They just demand that you think about things differently than how you’re accustomed to.
Anyway, i’d have to call the guys at PC Magazine “friendlies.” Not to Novell particularly, but to Linux and open source. There weren’t any things I said that they seemed to struggle with or want to debate. Most of what I presented seemed to make perfect sense to them, and they just nodded and we moved on to the next topic. While that validates what I was presenting, and I’m pleased about that, it also indicates that perception barriers may in many cases be my own.
So what I learned today is that when speaking to people about Linux and open source, you need to gauge what they already know. If they’re OSS “friendlies” and your messages and approach are straightforward–that is honest and realistic–then you’re work is mostly done for you.

Who is this guy?

[I moved this entry to my personal blog on 6 JAN 05, since my personal blog is developing more rapidly than this one. I left the reader comments to this entry, as I was unsure of how to preserve their integrity in the move.]

Marketing Products without Feature Differentiators

Part of understanding open source software (OSS) from a vendor’s marketing perspective is understanding that your product may not be unique. For that matter, you might not even be able to use the possessive “your” with an open source product. At least, not as you traditionally have used it.
Here’s the thing: if the product you are bringing to market is truly open source–not shared source or one of the other murkily-related-but-not-same definitions–then the barrier to entry for someone else to offer your same software product is probably so low as to make your product far less than unique. There are many Linux distributions available, for example, each using nearly the identical source code as all the others. Companies like Novell and Red Hat may innovate new features, but they have to contribute their innovations back to the general source code pool where any other vendor can use it, too. Today’s open source innovations, once generally accepted, are tomorrow’s feature that everyone else has too.
That presents a challenge to the software product marketer, who traditionally has had to present potential customers with product differentiators to compel a customer to decide on their product. Without product differentiators–or at least, without long-lasting product differentiators–how do you position your product as better than any other vendors? There are two ways that I quickly had to start looking at this to understand how to market open source products.
First is that, like open source development, open source marketing demands intellectual honesty. Product descriptions that include tired terms like “unmatched” and “unique” amount to pure puffery. The best way to describe an open source product is simply to state what it is, or what it does. Examples of this abound on some of the better OSS project homepages, where simple statements trump florid prose. Consider:

From www.kde.org:

• “KDE is a powerful Free Software graphical desktop environment for Linux and Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality, and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system.”

That opening sentence is the clincher. It just plainly states, this is what KDE is. Certainly, the second sentence stakes some more subjective claims, but because the first sentence was so direct and to the point, the claims come off as providing insight into the goals of the project rather than absolute declarations. There’s value in being direct and up front about what a product is and what it’s for.

The second thing I had to learn was that since your product cannot have long-term differentiators (unless you have somehow forked the code, and have diverged from the community and off into the cold wilderness), you need to differentiate your services. When the product is roughly the same (in feature set), the only thing that can make your product more compelling is the company that stands behind it (and how they stand behind it).

Both of those points indicate to me that marketing open source software is something of a different game. It’s not about generating as much hype as possible through overuse of superlatives, or by staking grandiose claims. That approach quickly shows its own limitations and may repel many would-be adopters who can quickly learn where the exaggerations lie. Being plain and honest about your product is step one. Step two is being plain and honest about your company’s relationship to the OSS products they provide, and how your company can help customers succeed with those products.

What I like about this most is that it neutralizes the marketer’s instinct to inflate a product’s capabilities or his/her company’s value. For a lot of people who have worked in more traditional marketing roles, this may seem like uncertain terrain. Alternatively, it may cause some to view their role in the value chain as having been rendered a mere tedious communicator of simple facts; all steak and no sizzle, if you will. What I am finding though is that it encourages a back-to-basics in marketing: state what your product is; stake your company’s position; and then price and promote on the basis of those first two.