I was interviewed twice yesterday while in Paris. One was with Olivier Rafal, a well-known French IT Journalist, and the other was a video interview by Didier Gerard who posts his interviews on TV4IT. The second one worries me a little primarily because it’s yet another opportunity to hear my own voice. Despite rumours to the contrary, I hate listening to my own voice. But I digress.
During both interviews I was asked a question about Eclipse competitors. Strangely, it caught me off guard the first time. I was asked something to the effect of “do you consider NetBeans and Visual Studio to be competitors for Eclipse?” Ultimately I believe that I left the interviewer with a rambling answer that boils down to “yes”.
I had a better answer the second time through. The answer was still “yes”, but I managed a much broader (and I believe more correct) answer. Yes, Eclipse the IDE competes with NetBeans and Visual Studio. Yes, Eclipse RCP competes with NetBeans RCP and other application frameworks. Yes, Eclipse BIRT competes with other reporting tools and frameworks. Yes, EMF competes with other modeling tools. Yes, Visual Editor competes with other visual composition tools and frameworks. Yes CDT, Web Tools, and Test and Performance Tools Platform compete with other frameworks and tools in their respective domains. And so on. For that matter, Eclipse competes with Apache, SourceForge, and others for open source projects. Ian and I compete for Mike’s attention.
Yes. We compete. And we’re very competitive.
