Marketing ColdFusion
I was reading Rey Bango's Blog today, and he had some interesting observations about how Adobe is marketing ColdFusion.
I posted the following comment to his blog post;
It is going to take more than marketing money. If you look at Ruby On Rails, 37 Signals has been able to effectively market Ruby without spending hardly any money. Most of the marketing has been viral for RoR.
Tim and Ben are both preparing trips to user groups right now to start promoting ColdFusion 8. I think that will help, but Adobe really needs to look at how some of these other scripting languages have been marketed. Python and Ruby, both scripting languages, have been gaining popularity over Java and C#. ColdFusion is a scripting language, and I would argue easier to use than Python or RoR. Adobe should be able to leverage that increase interest in developing web applications using scripting languages.
Right now ColdFusion has about a 6% market share. That should be higher when you look at the other languages that compete with ColdFusion.
Keep in mind that Ruby, Perl and Python are all open source products. These are community projects without a company like Adobe to market it as a product.
I think what's really needed is a way to get ColdFusion out there to people and companies that aren't currently using it. I'd like to see Adobe start cross-selling ColdFusion to organizations that already use their other products (Acrobat, LiveCycle, etc.). Getting Adobe out to those user groups and finding a way to plug ColdFusion there would be something else.
Charlie Griefer asked me the same question. I read a survey on digg.com that had a breakdown of the percentage of jobs per language. The languages included ColdFusion, C++, Java, .NET, Python, Perl, Ruby, C#, VB .NET and ASP 3.0.
ColdFusion had 6%, which was double what Ruby had as its share. This same survey showed that there were three times as many jobs for Java as there where for .NET. In the Jacksonville area, this is certainly not the case.
The point I was trying to make was that ColdFusion has a respectable share, but it should be much higher when you consider the ease of use.
Numbers are just like whores. You can do anything you want with them once you get them on the sheets.
David.
dude that's -so- much better than my "87% of statistics are meaningless" :)
http://www.corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.ent...
and, give credit where it's due, Tim's identified an area where Adobe can do better:
http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=day&...
and there's some recognition of the task at hand:
http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=day&...
The forthcomming CF8 release will, IMHO be a _real_ test of the effectiveness of Adobe marketing of a Macromedia product (that isn't Flash-based).
I'd still argue that you're not going to get many new players by doing a roadshow to user groups. Preaching to the converted as has been said. I'm involved with enough user groups to recognise Tim/Ben's roadshow will help keep CF people up to speed to maintain their own positions. Keep CF in place.
but how do you get to the business managers to take a good look at CF and consider it for the first time? by compelling business cases: savings thru CF's RAD development.
I know of 2 cases in my city - one a huge banking/finance/insurance company - where CF has be adopted by business managers and supported by bean counters - with roaring sucess where Java/JSP failed.
For me, the event that will prove CF has come of age is when a CF story makes it into the IT edition of the Tuesdays Australian (newspaper). The Business section.
There *are* news-worthy CF sucess stories out there. But why aren't I reading about them in the IT press? Lots of IT managers have heard of Adobe but do they know that it has a webserver product? and why it's worth considering? Can we get some mentions of CF when Adobe bigwigs do interviews?
Tim's already mentioned that advertising directly to managers is a waste of money. Yeah, he's probably right. but to rely on viral advertising needs targeting the correct group - eg: my boss.
A few months ago when there was a similar discussion about adoption of CF, I almost got my head bitten off for saying that I think the cost of CF is a prohibitive factor. If that weren't true, then why do people always bring it up? It was brought up in the digg thread, and it gets brought up all the time by people who know little to nothing about ColdFusion <--- it's THOSE people whose eyes we are trying to open!!! Just because some people think a few grand means nothing to business does not mean that developers who are looking for a language to call their own will think the same way - they just won't. Ask any developer who has never used or taken the time to evaluate ColdFusion and they will say "doesn't that cost money?". If people can't look past the dollar signs then they will never see the language (and platform) for what is really is. Cost *is* a prohibiting factor to CF adoption. Can anyone honestly tell me that I don't have a valid point here?
I think Adobe need to take a clear stance with the "Developer" edition of CF. Don't call it a "free trial". Just call it "free" and still clearly list any limitations (maybe the limitations can be relaxed a little too, but that's for another post). Don't smother the ColdFusion homepage with "Buy online", "Buy or upgrade", "Order by phone". Just have a whopping great box that says "Download now". Seriously, take a look at the page (http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/): the first link you see at the top of the content is "Buy or upgrade to ColdFusion MX 7", and the first link you see in the navigation on the right is "Buy online'. Remember: almost all of the competition is completely free - there is no such thing as "Buy online" with Ruby or Phython or PHP or Java.
Adobe also need to make sure that the CF8 open beta is well advertised. Hell, they could start letting in a few more people into the closed beta (Yes I have signed up but I want in!). People need to know about it. Getting the word out there starts *now*, not when CF8 is released!
Adobe is already working on CF9. They could always drop development, but I do not think they will as long as they continue making money with the product.
David.