[ocaml-biz] public strategy

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Martin Jambon wrote:
>
> By the way, I don't know what should be public and what should not be
> public concerning our strategies... at least all the emails
> of ocaml-biz
> are visible and Google-searchable (so we will see in a few days if my
> message can be found easily or not :-).

I believe that open source communities, particularly ones at OCaml's
stage of growth, need the doors open pretty wide.  I don't see anyone
beating down the doors of ocaml-biz yet, or COCAN either.  I think when
we actually have the problem of "too many cooks spoiling the broth,"
we'll know it.  At that point, one starts discussing privately the
issues that aren't getting resolved publically.  Hopefully by that
stage, there's a network of people who actually, quietly get things
done.  We're not there yet.  We're still defining what needs to be done,
and in the Grand Strategy sense, we've had little to argue about.

I've been through some of these dynamics on the marketing-python mailing
list before.  It's quite a dance, really.  I would get blamed for being
disruptive.  What I was really doing was Shaping people, ala
http://www.teams.org.uk/shaper.htm .  In my view, and I'm pretty much
vindicated by subsequent history, the real problem was/is the Python
Software Foundation's utter lack of will to do anything.  I was hardly
alone in this view.  Lotsa people folded up their tent and went home.
People who had produced the tangibles needed for progress, not just my
brand of spurring / cajoling / cheerleading.

Thus why I am very worried about INRIA and *really* intent on getting a
lot of ducks in a row before opening any discussion with them.

One thing I do believe, is that the core techie communities surrounding
a language like OCaml or Python are utterly incompetent at marketing.
It's suicide to discuss marketing problems on forums like caml-list and
comp.lang.python.  The best strategy is to ignore such forums, set up
one's own marketing and business forums, and feel reasonably secure that
the techies will never look at them.  It also helps to avoid the
temptation of bringing up business issues on a techie list, but for
someone like myself who wants to Shape people, that temptation cannot
always be avoided.  I do, after all, want to advance the idea that
business, marketing, and growth should be dealt with.  The debacles may
bring recruits to the business and marketing forums, people who actually
share the "world conquest" agenda but don't want to get reamed by their
fellow techies.

The gross incompetence of techies at marketing stems from the dominance
of their Introversion, ala the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators.
http://humanmetrics.com  Language promulgation is an Extrovert activity,
whereas the Introverts are the ones best equipped to create a language,
play with it, and otherwise function as early adopters.  In contrast, a
friend of mine at Microsoft has commented that it is filled with
"hard-driving Extroverts," that this is the archetype of success within
the company.  He didn't fit this profile, and his own stress about "not
fitting in" led him to study the MBTI.  Which is how I came to acquire
quite a power tool for my previously established world view, exemplified
by my .sig.

I may be an Introvert in general life, but within the technical arena,
I'm exceedingly Extrovert.  I'm always writing on mailing lists, and
always pushing to "take over the world" with something.  This results in
friction.  Hopefully also progress, someday.  :-)


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.