If there was a general theme to take home at the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy on the second day of the conference – beside from Plone now being officially trademarked – it has to be that “Plone is a Product” and “Plone is Democracy”.
Now everybody repeat after me… No, seriously – all together now! :)
I think “Plone is a Product” is a very important statement. It really helps to explain that “Plone is not technology” and it’s a helpful ‘tool’ to position and ‘sell’ Plone, both for the community and people new to Plone.
“Plone is Democracy” tells a powerful story with only three words. Plone is open for anyone who wishes to participate. Plone is you.
[tags] plone, ploneconf2007, conference, naples, italy, community, software, people, social, mantra, positioning, marketing, branding, trademark[/tags]
Well, I sort of have a problem with seeing Plone as a Product. This product would then be a CMS. But isn’t that limiting things quite a bit?
I mean, I am writing some GTD application with it, it can easily be used as underlying framework for most social networks and so on.. That’s why I really see it more as a platform.. And the whole component story speaks for the platform approach, too.
(actually earlier I would have called it sort of a distribution but these days most products seem to be part of Plone core so that’s maybe not so true anymore).
Nothing to add to the “Plone is _you_”! :-)
I think of it this way: How do I market and sell a platform?
When I think about platform vs product in my world (read: in an non-tech executive and decision maker setting), I can’t really say that “a platform” springs to mind as a reoccurring topic.
I would argue it is easier for non-tech centered people understand and accept “a product” as opposed to “a platform”.
Plone is a Content Management System that is ready out of the box. It has great security, work flow, accessibility and languages support built right in. That’s definitely properties of an understandable and marketable product.
That you can use the product Plone as a starting point to expand and evolve from is to me inherit properties of the product Plone (TM) and not the other way around. I would argue that products have the inherit possibility to be a platform, but not necessarily vice versa.
Some other thoughts about Product vs Platform:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/09/every-product-i.html
http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/kevinmcguire/2007/08/17/platform-product-floor-wax-the-solution-exists/
http://sam.curren.ws/index.cfm/2006/11/9/Platform-vs-Product