Hi Ean:
Interesting statistics. Thanks for the research. BTW, can you get stats
on specific daily or weekly OFBiz download volumes? If so, how could I
get them?
Your points about Magento are well founded and if I had access to the
marketing muscle that ASF had, I'd start working that angle straight
away. Which brings me back to my main point which I still believe is
still lost on this group.
Let me put this another way: There is no other venue for OFBiz to get
connected with the marketing muscle that ASF has to offer. I don't
really care if ApacheCon is characterized as a developer's conference.
Its the only thing going right now...So, given that, why not take
advantage of it? I'm willing to present as many as 3 user level
presentations. Could anyone on the OFBiz PMC take the initiative and
tell the conference coordinators that OFBiz wants time and space to
present? Please, lets get on with it instead of splitting hairs over
the purpose of the conference
Regards,
Ruth
Ean Schuessler wrote:
Ruth Hoffman wrote:
Nice, but I think you might be missing my point.
ApacheCon is all about telling the world about OFBiz and using the
immense resources available to the Foundation to do that.
I disagree. ApacheCon will never be the primary way people discover
and get excited about OFBiz. The Internet will always blow a physical
meeting out of the water when it comes to getting the word out. To
support my theory, let's examine the Google Trends plot for "OFBiz":
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ofbiz&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
To me, this graph makes crystal clear the fact that making a big
splash with a formal release gets people's attention. If you look at
event "C" (OFBiz 09.04) you can see that it dwarfs the impact of event
"A" (ApacheCon). Its also clear to me that we've been relatively flat
in popularity (neither gaining nor losing) as opposed to say:
oscommerce -
http://www.google.com/trends?q=oscommerce&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
openbravo -
http://www.google.com/trends?q=openbravo&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
or
magento -
http://www.google.com/trends?q=magento&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Magento is a bona-fide phenomena and we really need to be picking on
them. We kick their butt feature-wise, even at their $12,000 a year
"enterprise" level.
IMHO it isn't really about socializing with the small and (getting
smaller by the hour) OFBiz community. ApacheCon is for our end-users.
Or rather, our potential end-users. This should be the place where we
showcase our wares and not "vacation with a purpose".
I've been to a *lot* of developer oriented conferences over the years
and I can tell you with some confidence that they are not a good place
for finding new customers or bringing around novice users. Even cheap
conferences are well out of the price range of most casual adopters.
The important and transformative phenomena that can happen is great,
densely packed technical discussion that achieves in hours what might
take weeks on a mailing list. The other important thing I've seen
happen is a "dev jam" where major new features are sketched up or long
standing bugs are squashed. Having all the major players sitting
together in the same room for 8 to 10 hours does have an effect that
is hard to replicate otherwise.
Done right, this kind of developer oriented conference can definitely
have a positive effect on new but technically proficient users. For
the real non-technical newbie they are just going to be too far behind
to get anything valuable out of such an event. They either need a
turn-key solution with how-to videos on the net or an intensive
training session.
Business process discussions might be another matter and that would be
a very interesting thing for us to consider adding to a conference. By
that I mean bringing in subject matter experts in materials handling,
accounting and customer service from serious OFBiz users and talking
about the processes at a high level that the code supports.
