7 Mar
2011
7 Mar
'11
3:28 a.m.
Hello Ludovic and all,
Although I am setting aside weekends for cjdns, I've been following this discussion
quite closely.
On 03/04/2011 03:27 PM, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
Hi Andreas,
Thanks for your email. This is actually good material and we need more of it.
As Jerome pointed out, I never said in my email I would go back to development.
My objective is too involve myself in the "product definition" which means
making a better product
which fits more the market needs.
I believe it has the objective to help us get XWiki less a "niche" product and
making it more
mainstream.
I think there is risk in moving away from the niche. The internet is a big place (getting
bigger
every day) but everyone can be the best at something. To try to be more general will mean
competing
with more niche players in more niches all of whom are presumably the best at doing what
they do.
I think we should spend more time defining the niche where we are the best in the world,
defining
the exact demographic to whom we appeal, and making the it easier for them to find xwiki,
install
it, and get something presentable.
If it means that we need to work on packaged distribution let's do it. If it means
working on
distribution this goes beyond "Product Marketing", though I'm also
interested into that.
I'm also getting more involved in XWiki SAS marketing and while we have spend the
XWiki SAS
marketing efforts more into showing a 'professional' face to potential customers,
we plan to invest
more time in open source marketing. As Vincent points outs this is also a collective
effort as there
is nobody better than our committers to get XWiki known in the tech world.
I think we also need to clearly define out target.
+1
You mention "wordpress" but even if we can
do
some things that wordpress is used for, this is not what we are good at, and wordpress
does not do
what XWiki does.
Wordpress is the best at being wordpress, xwiki is the best at being xwiki. If we try to
be all
things to all people, we will disappoint everyone.
As Jerome pointed out, XWiki is about
"collaboration". That's our market. That's what XWiki is good
at. It's not any kind of collaboration, as XWiki's way of collaboration is
different than what
people have been used to.
If we try to compare our "reach" with CMSs we will always loose, since these
tools build public web
sites and this automatically extend their reach.
I think we need to focus on making XWiki known to people interested in collaboration,
interested in
bringing their organization to that type of collaboration.
It's a collaboration that is:
- social
- a mix of unstructured and structured
- flexible
Making XWiki more known for that requires both more "distribution" and
"communication" as you
mentionned, but I also believes it requires more work on our end on XWiki itself.
Not more work to start a "feature" frenzy, but to improve XWiki to more
democratize it, simplify it
for newcomers, making it's powerfull features more accessible to newcomers.
+1 we have so many features, IMO we are better off improving and polishing the existing
features and
bragging about them more.
For example, one of the most powerfull feature of XWiki since day 1, is it's internal
Class/Object
system which allows to create new data structures from the web. Unfortunately this
feature requires
a too steep learning curve.
This is indeed at the heart of what defines us. I'm not sure the learning curve is too
steep but
perhaps we are not explaining it correctly or are explaining it to the wrong audience.
"App Within Minute" is not a NEW feature.
It's the Class/Object system XWiki should always have had.
Another example, "Dashboards". Dashboards is not a completely NEW feature.
It's THE "modern" way of
configuring a home page for basic users.
I know we have plenty of "quality" refinements to do in XWiki, but we also have
plenty of
refinements to do that will complete XWiki for it's "purpose", and for what
it's differentiated from
other tools.
I'm very open to discuss more what we can do both in the product and in distribution
and
communication to make XWiki more popular and widespread.
You mentionned I was talking only about "features", and I supposed you refer to
the "feature"
survey. Actually the current "feature survey" did include "VM"
distribution.
So maybe we should extend the "feature survey" into an "effort
survey", to actually discuss what we
should spend our effort on for XWiki.
So if you or others have ideas on what we should spend our effort on, please bring them
on.
I think we need to start from the questions:
1. What makes xe different from mediawiki or twiki or confluence? I know that xe
distinguishes
itself from mediawiki because it is easier to install. People have java installed and they
don't
want to monkey around with php.
Something which I have thought would be nice is a template to walk users through the
installation
process so they need only drop the .war file on the disk and be walked through the rest of
the
installation process.
2. What makes platform different from php or python with pylons and why should my project
be based
on platform? I think this question has not gotten enough examination since changes which
strengthen
the platform and separate it from xe are not as visible as a change which brings new
functionality
to xe.
As core and commons become more complete an interesting exercise would be to try building
a small
application such as a bulletin board or a primitive bug tracker without using xwiki-core.
A little
project like this accelerate the development of replacements for xwiki-core features and
functions
while highlighting code which is in platform but should be in xe. A priority goal of such
a project
should be minimal .war file size. At the end we would know a lot more about platform and
have a
small easily deployed thing which showcased platform.
Caleb
Ludovic
Le 04/03/11 10:48, Andreas Hahn a écrit :
Hi,
I'm a bit surprised that you are just talking about features and not
about moving from a niche product to get more mainstream.
When I'm saying niche product I'm just referring to what google trends says.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+foswiki%2C+twiki%2C+confluence
Well I think that almost all people on this mailing list like xwiki a
lot and the hard and devoted work the developers are doing and all wish
xwiki and its backing company all the best and a long and prosperous future.
However I'm concerned when reading that the XWiki SAS 'Product
Marketing' lead (and CEO) thinks that it helps the product to get more
involved as a developer.
IMHO a product marketing lead should have totally different priorities.
IMHO its a misconception to think that more features will help the
product to attract a greater audience.
Just a few things that come to my mind:
* Push xwiki into as many linux distros as possible with 'one click
installers'
* Create ready-to-go images for popular cloud hosters (such as Amazon EC2)
* Talk to as much hosters and push them to introduce XWiki as part of
their offerings.
* Make it simple and attractive for people currently using other
software (Wordpress comes to my mind) to move to the more powerful XWiki
I may be paranoid but I wonder if we will see XWiki survive the next
couple of years if its not gaining momentum in the big world.
just my 2 cents
Andreas
Am 03.03.2011 14:21, schrieb Ludovic Dubost:
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devs(a)xwiki.org
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs Hi all,
As many of you may know, 7 years ago, I created the XWiki Open-Source
software. A few years ago, especially when Vincent arrived, I took a
step back from development of the XWiki product to focus on
developping XWiki SAS which allows to support the XWiki development.
I've particularly spent my time making sure that the deployments of
XWiki our Customers have been doing are successfull. I've left the
product development work to committers who under the lead of Vincent
have done amazing work in the last few years. We have provided some
product marketing in addition through Guillaume's and lately Gregory's
work which allowed to bring some feedback from users and customers and
also bring a different less technical perspective to the XWiki Product
development. Cati also joined the team and allowed us to make huge
steps forward in product usability and design.
Now, as XWiki SAS's project implementation team is doing great work on
it's own, I've decided to involve myself more in the future of XWiki's
product. I'm now the new XWiki SAS 'Product Marketing' head which
means I will involve myself in community discussions about the product
features actively developped, investigated for future development as
well as in general discussions about the XWiki Software's future. I
will try to bring the knowledge that XWiki SAS's customer, project
managers, support team bring us from using XWiki in production
environments to the community so that we make better decisions, more
focused on developments that will allow to increase XWiki's success
with end users. At XWiki SAS we have already done a lot of work to
organize this feedback so that we know more things that XWiki SAS's
developers and the XWiki community should work on.
In the next few weeks you will therefore see me work on the
investigations of future features as well as work more closely with
developers whenever they feel the need on the features they implement
actively. I will also manage the different surveys we have done in the
past to gather feedback from our community. These surveys have still
been running on the xwiki.org web site although they are now quite
outdated. I will propose to review them and launch them again.
If users or developers have any feedback about XWiki, about what we
should work on in priority, please do send that feedback on the list
(preferably). Although we have a much bigger list of great ideas than
what we currently can achieve, you can help us on helping us select
the most important ones that will make a difference.
I would like to use this occasion to thank our great community of
developers and users who help the committers every day to make XWiki
better. We could not do this without all the suggestions, ideas,
patches that our community provides.
Thanks
Ludovic
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