Ask ten people that know RedMonk what we’re about, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. Maybe more. Some think of us as “you know, the open source guys.” To others, we’re the guys who “are a bit different.” There are even some who think, because of the etymology of our name, we only cover IBM and Microsoft.
None of which, of course, are correct.
But the one thing most everyone who deals with us gets is that we are about developers. We were founded on the simple idea that technology adoption was in the process of changing. What was once a strictly top down selection process had become fundamentally bottom up. Developers, more than any other single audience, were and are the determining factor in a given technology’s success or failure.
Certainly we listen to CIOs, IT managers and the like. But developers are why we exist.
This is why we give the presentations we do. This is why we help the developers that we know get free gear. This is why we will argue on behalf of open source foundations, even against our own clients, if necessary. This is why we do podcasts and interviews with developers. This is why we run @monkjobs. This is why we make our content available for free, and sponsor the production of open source software.
This might also be why some people think of us a bit differently than some of the other analyst firms out there.
It is definitely why, however, it was very weird to be told by a friend that our home page didn’t use the word developers once. Zero mentions. Everybody’s got issues with their home page, sure, but this was absurd.
Consider how the opening paragraph on our webpage used to read:
RedMonk is the first analyst firm built on open source. We’re dedicated to providing high quality research at no cost, and believe that the dialog that follows is beneficial to us, our community and our clients.
All true, in our view. But while that does an excellent job of telling you how we do things, it does an exceptionally poor job of telling you what we do. Which is suboptimal, given that that’s kind of the reason for having a home page.
So we updated it yesterday to the following:
RedMonk is the first and only developer focused industry analyst firm. We believe that developers are the most important constituency in technology, which is why we work on their behalf for technology companies large and small.
Still true, or so we believe, just a bit more on topic. To be sure, nothing has actually changed but the text. We are still the same business, the same analysts that you’ve always worked with. We are hopefully just getting a bit better at talking about that.
And lest you think this is just talk and marketing crap, rest assured that we’ll be talking to you soon, hopefully, about a few things we’ll be rolling out that might be of interest to developers and those care about developers.
In the meantime, please don’t be shy if you’re a developer and we can help. That’s why we’re here, after all.
