{"id":1177,"date":"2008-02-02T17:10:29","date_gmt":"2008-02-02T23:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/02\/02\/nerd-fight-identity-and-making-letting-enterprise-software-be-boring\/"},"modified":"2008-02-02T17:10:29","modified_gmt":"2008-02-02T23:10:29","slug":"nerd-fight-identity-and-making-letting-enterprise-software-be-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/02\/02\/nerd-fight-identity-and-making-letting-enterprise-software-be-boring\/","title":{"rendered":"Nerd Fight: Identity &#8211; And Making Letting Enterprise Software be Boring"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In case you don&#8217;t follow Sun identity blogs as I do, I thought I might pull together a weirdly out of place spat-by-viral-video story that&#8217;s been going on.<\/p>\n<p>In one corner, you have the Sun Identity group, in the other Ping Identity.<\/p>\n<p>And then it gets real nerd-fight. Check it out:<\/p>\n<h2>Ping on Ping<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.com\/raskin\/entry\/sun_versus_ping_an_epic\">The first video<\/a> was really the most brilliant, if, you know, kind of ass-holey if you take making fun of competitors to be a bad thing:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<h2>Ping Pings Back<\/h2>\n<p>The Ping Identity has some fun <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.pingidentity.com\/blog\/default\/2008\/01\/29\/Ping-Strikes-Back\">in response<\/a>, taking the &#8220;Sun is a big bad bucket of enterprise baddies&#8221; stance that smaller companies will.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.pingidentity.com\/blog\/default\/2008\/01\/29\/Ping-Strikes-Back\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cote-media.redmonk.com\/cote\/files\/2012\/06\/200802030826-tm.jpg\" height=\"100\" width=\"151\" alt=\"200802030826\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Whether it&#8217;s a good idea to compare yourself to people who get killed is a moot question in all this fun.<\/p>\n<h2>The Wrap-up<\/h2>\n<p>So then there&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.com\/raskin\/entry\/the_epic_response\">the sort of wrap-up video<\/a>. The, &#8220;hey, let&#8217;s all go to lobby and buy ourselves a snack&#8221; sort of monetization point.<\/p>\n<p>Look at those hot-dogs jiggle to and fro&#8217; with those ice-cold sodas!<\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s Going on Here<\/h2>\n<p>I bet in all of 2007 there weren&#8217;t as many people smiling about something as boring as Identity Management than with these three videos. There&#8217;s got to be tons of people thinking about whether or not to spend money on that area or not who now think it&#8217;s something &#8211; shocker! &#8211; entertaining to think about.<\/p>\n<p>Enterprise software is boring when we let it be. Once you throw in actual humans into the equation, and here, once you try to make a sports-fan level tribalism about it, then you&#8217;ve got something. I mean, what sounds more fun, more like something you&#8217;d like to spend money on: application servers, or whatever bits and bytes <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.jboss.com\/blog\/mfleury\/2006\/02\/21\/Strip_Mining_and_Waste_Dumping_in_Open_Source.txt\">crazy Marc Fleury was frothing about<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Mule is a lot more exciting than TIBCO or anything ending with a Q &#8217;cause they have the mad-hatter of ESB entertainment, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnet.com\/negative-approach\/\">Dave Rosenberg<\/a>, at the helm. And I hear the technology ain&#8217;t too shabby either. Of course, TIBCO&#8217;s no dummies either: they threw up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tibco.com\/company\/news\/releases\/2007\/press795.jsp\">everyone&#8217;s favorite Gregg the Architect<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>When I used to tell my English teachers that some book (or worse, poem) was boring, they&#8217;d spin around at me, throw some grammar books at my head, and say one of those impossibly teen-frustrating things like &#8220;no, <i>you&#8217;re<\/i> just too boring to make it interesting!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Enterprise software marketing is pretty much like that, except without the books to the head.<\/p>\n<p><b>Disclaimer:<\/b> Sun and MuleSource are clients. Also, I got a minor in English, and it turns out it really was mostly just boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Identity nerd-fight video round-up, advice on making enterprise software marketing more interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","category-identity","category-marketing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}