The Power of PR, is JBoss/Red Hat a failure?

I was surprised to find this controversial blog entry by Dana Blankenhorn. He certainly caught my eye with that title: "Is it time to call JBoss/RHT a failure?"


Fleury left Red Hat in 2007, and since then I’ve gotten a steady parade of news releases, about former JBOSS executives starting brand new companies. In fact, I am overdue for a visit to one of those companies.

Meanwhile, JBOSS rival SpringSource has gone from strength to strength. Its latest acquisition is Covalent. It’s hosting user meetings in five-star resorts.


Let me first address the PR failure. What Dana is really saying is that he hasn't gotten any news releases from JBoss. As I have said in previous blog entries, all RHT has to do to be perceived as a multi-product company is to TALK about it's multi-product line-up. When I talk to RHT partners who do JBoss consulting they tell me that their business is going through the roof. The record JBoss World attendance and my previous coverage corroborate this. Unfortunately, in the absence of any news releases from RHT about JBoss products and momentum, the press corps defaults to news releases about departures. Normally, the latter would be a big snoozer. It only seems important in the dearth of any official JBoss news out of RHT. See my post on Blacktie, the drop-in replacement for BEA Tuxedo, as a great example of bungled product news.

Spring is touting itself as a JBoss replacement. Smart PR, but false. Spring is a development framework comprising wrappers and dependency injection on top of Hibernate and Tomcat runtimes, both developed, and monetized by JBoss. Where the official PR talks about them being used everywhere on Wall Street, I hear a more insightful story from their own sales guys about how impossible it is to monetize that usage. Some call it "the Spring Conumdrum".

Meanwhile, when I picked up the latest neon-colored issue of Wired "Everything will be free!!!" which caused me to snicker, whom should I read about but Their Current Hotnesses, the Ruby on Rails dynamic duo--David Heinemeir Hansson (aka God or DHH) and Jason Fried (his prophet). It was a great article. In between curing leprosy and walking on water in the software development realm, these kids go around insulting their users, answering critics with "f--- you" slides, the article is complete with their own brand of backlash. They appear to be minting money, selling products no less, and speculating that they come from another planet. Good People, people after my own heart. They embody the latest, rather virulent strain of Professional OSS. They have avoided the Spring conundrum and are selling product.

And it got me thinking: Three projects, three different life stages. As a colleague put it: JBoss is a MILF. She is aging well, she's beautiful, and the children (projects like JBoss Seam and BlackTie), are doing just fine thank-you-very-much. On the cover of every magazine, RoR is the hot new thing. It's eighteen, it's perky and oh, that sexy pout! The excitable fringe is just in lust. Meanwhile, Spring is getting a little longer in the tooth, and after dinner and a movie (training), there is really not much people need to stick around for (like a product subscription). So she gets a boob job (aka Covalent).

Back to Dana, he's just responding to what he hears. He hasn't heard from JBoss and he's not the only journalist who tells me this. At the end of the day, the definitive way to take the pulse of the RHT/JBoss pairing is on numbers, sales numbers, not on "feeling" derived from deficient PR. As I've covered in my previous blog--despite ill-defined marketing message and broken PR, JBoss R&D's intact, product line-up is solid, sales is now aligned and momentum and usage are up.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Well, Marc, to follow your analogy, sounds like if SpringSource doesn't want to get raped by Oracle, they need to get themselves a good man (i.e., someone with a stiff run-time component).
adt43wt342 said…
It isn't called rape, it is called marriage. And as far as "big man with big money" goes, Mr O may be the best game in town for them.

Can PTB get it up again? cause you know the last time around he viagra'd up and impressed us all... maybe.

Staying independent is a tough act. I wish Spring good luck in finding a suitable party. They should tone the rhetoric down because the suitor will come sooner rather than later.
Marc,

You never get stale, which is why people come back over and over to read our blog. When are you going to blog about how easy Appcelerator was to use? Marc is writing code, people watch out!

Ben
adt43wt342 said…
hey! a comment on a controversial topic. And it is not self serving.
hmmm, arun? is that you arun?
Herve said…
Let's name this post "The power of blog". Without a you would never had been able to counter this PR.
Dana says a lot of things. It doesn't mean it's worth too much attention. ;-)
adt43wt342 said…
Herve,

in math:

blog C pr
adt43wt342 said…
Roy,

Actually I took Dana's article at face value. Please do not construe this as "Dana is wrong". All I really say is that Dana is writing about what he hears and he hasn't heard about JBoss, he has heard about the departures and about Spring.

But Dana historically has been fair in his analysis, he is more commentary than fact/news driven.

You will notice that I haven't touched the real meat of his commentary and argument which is "what is purchasable in OSS?". But rather concluded that he isn't hearing the story, hence the PR failure, since I know better from JBW.
Marc,

shaking my head, "I'm done"
are you sure
shaking my head again, "I'm not done"

maybe my alter ego is alive in spirit:)

Ben
I like Dana's writings and cite him a lot. I guess it's just important to see it as op-ed (or rumour-ed). Rebuttal seems reasonable.
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