Day 2 at EclipseCon

Been another solid day here at EclipseCon. Before I forget, let me compliment both the Eclipse gang and the Santa Clara Conference center on their attention to two important details for conference attendees: wireless and power. Both were in abundance, which made keeping up with business a trivial exercise. What follows are a couple of summary thoughts on the day today:

• Laptops:
  Unusual for the conferences I attend these days, Powerbooks and iBooks were relatively uncommon. I’ve seen a ton of Thinkpads and Dells, but not too many OS X machines, relatively speaking. I’m not sure what to conclude from that, but I found it interesting.

• Bottom Up Marketing:
  My session this morning drew a decent crowd; nothing unmanageable, but a solid showing. While no one was interested in asking questions during the designated Q&A period, I had a bunch of interesting conversations after I closed the session and walked out. Folks from a couple of smaller but well known software firms were asking about how to start blogs and wikis, what to expect, and one gentleman inquired on community building methods. All in all, I’m pleased; seems like a couple of folks got something out of it.

• Lunch w/ Zend:
  Following my presentation, I caught up on some email, then sat down for lunch with Zend’s Andi Gutmans and Guy Harpaz, along with IBM’s Stewart Nickolas. We discussed a number of topics, including dynamic languages, Java and Eclipse. It may interest you to know that none of those folks are binary thinkers on the subject of Java; their focus is more on interop than head to head competiton.

• Building the Eclipse Community:
  Later in the afternoon, I caught Ian Skerrett’s (Eclipse Marketing Director) presentation on lessons learned from the Eclipse community. It was a great session, which given the alignment in our thinking around the importance of conversational marketing, resonated well with me. A couple of the interesting tidbits:
  • BIRT has accumulated somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 10 thousand newgroup postings since its inception
  • Ian appeared to be borrowing a page from the Lessig method; his slides were nicely spartan (which reminds me, I need to convert the Bottom Up Marketing deck at some point)
  • Lowering the Barriers to Entry – a key theme of ours – was a big part of the presentation
  • Ian’s Lessons Learned?
    1. Start the conversation
    2. Make it easy to join
    3. Feed the conversation
    4. Invite others to be part of the community
    5. Remember to thank the contributors
    6. Be part of the community
  • A couple of firms, including a UK Courier Service and a Canary Islands Real Estate agency, appear to have ‘borrowed’ the Eclipse logoi – worth a chuckle
• OpenSolaris:
  Interestingly, was a topic of discussion of several attendees at the show this afternoon; a few had even heard of Nexenta. It’s not about to displace Linux as the OS of choice, but the awareness of the OS was higher than I expected – particularly amongst the dynamic language folks.

All in all, an interesting day.

Disclaimer: Actuate (BIRT), Eclipse, Sun (OpenSolaris), and Zend are RedMonk clients, while a UK Courier Service and Canary Islands Real Estate agent are not.