I don't want to respond directly to Seth's call for a vote of confidence in
Meng.
I just wish to offer some observations...
What I think is happening is a natural, common aspect of the growth of any
technically-complex product - the product and its marketing need to split into
parallel paths.
This pattern is common inside large corporations (I was in them for 35+ years)
but is, I think, a natural (and inevitable?) feature of any complex, evolving
product such as this, regardless of the organisation (or lack of) in which it is
growing.
The problem comes with time-frames and perspectives.
The technical strand is continually testing, innovating and evolving - thinking
of the next generation. It is also concerned for the 'purity' of the concept.
The marketing strand needs to present the product to the world as a series of
stable snapshots. They need to give the impression of stability, dependability
and of an ordered sequence of releases. They also have to do deals with the
market as a whole, they have to seek partnerships, forge alliances etc.
Obviously Meng _is_ now the leading figure in that Marketing strand; he's doing
all the things I've learned to expect of marketers, and all the usual rivalries
and conflicts between marketing and product development are emerging.
The particular post which has prompted me to write is the one by "Shane Rush" of
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 5:22 AM, in which he noted that his clients are
dissuaded from adopting SFP after visiting this list.
In a 'real' (i.e. not virtual), mature organisation, no sane marketing process
would allow potential clients to come and hang about in the developer's lab,
listening to the kind of animated discussions which are a natural, healthy part
of the design & development process, nor to eavesdrop on the usual marketing vs.
development bitching that always takes place.
Any Open process has great strengths, which is why most of us are here. But it
also has its weaknesses - which is what we are now experiencing.
We need to find a way of managing this natural, (inevitable?)
marketing // development parallelism without losing the benefits of Openness (or
the entire SPF program).
Perhaps a fork of spf-discuss into
spf-current + spf-future
or (better?)
spf-marketing + spf-technical
?
Has anyone got any pointers to how other open, high-visibility projects have
approached this problem? Apache?? Mozilla?? Open-Office??
Chris Haynes