Just wrapping up a busy week of the Marketing Symposium and Members’ Meeting. It is always great to see face to face the people from companies working in the Eclipse community. I really wish we could do this more often but I guess we will have to wait until EclipseCon 2006.
Lots have people have been asking me for the presentations from the Marketing Symposium. I have posted most of the presentations up on eclipse.org in pdf and powerpoint format. I’ll work on getting the rest up next week.
When we first started talking about the marketing symposium, I was not sure if it would work. Would people attend? Could I convince some member companies to share some of their success stories. Well we had between 50-60 people in attendance and 10 different speakers (probably too many for the time allotted). The content was for the most part solid and so far the feedback I’ve received has been all positive.
For those that could not attend, some of the highlights for me:
Carl Zetie from Forrester had tons of slides and data on the trends of enterprises adopting Eclipse. In my opinion, Carl is doing some of the best in-depth research on Eclipse in the enterprise. From his presentation the things that stuck out for me were:
- Lots of developers are using multiple languages and therefore are using Eclipse and Visual Studio side by side. Sounds like a C# IDE at Eclipse would be pretty cool.
- Eclipse usage is spreading across the software lifecycle, especially for test. Nice to see.
- Carl had some data on what are the barriers for adoption. Two things that were ranked low that surprised me were 1) lack of support (often lack of support ranks high as a barrier to adoption of open source) and 2) managing the complexity of multiple plug-ins was not viewed as a barrier. Nice to see too.
Stephen O’Grady did a great job presenting on conversational marketing. If you are struggling to figure out how to ‘market’ to developers, you need to talk to Stephen or at least look at his slides. If you are a developer, Stephen is looking for feedback on his slides. Let him know what you think. Stephen, next time you should start with the Balmer video. developers, developers, developers, developers
The lightening talks had some great content. Two things that really stuck out for me were:
1. Maher’s Massi presentation on the global distribution of myEclipse downloads. I often get asked the question ‘where is Eclipse being used’. I think Maher’s presentation demonstrates it is a global phenomenum.
2. Takaki-san from NTT Comware has two great slides in his presentation. One shows the market share of Eclipse in Japan and the other shows all the Eclipse Japanese books. Very cool. I will be using that in some of my presentations. 
I hope we do this again next year.
