In case you don’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’s been going on.
In one corner, you have the Sun Identity group, in the other Ping Identity.
And then it gets real nerd-fight. Check it out:
Ping on Ping
The first video was really the most brilliant, if, you know, kind of ass-holey if you take making fun of competitors to be a bad thing:
Ping Pings Back
The Ping Identity has some fun in response, taking the “Sun is a big bad bucket of enterprise baddies” stance that smaller companies will:
Whether it’s a good idea to compare yourself to people who get killed is a moot question in all this fun.
The Wrap-up
So then there’s the sort of wrap-up video. The, “hey, let’s all go to lobby and buy ourselves a snack” sort of monetization point.
Look at those hot-dogs jiggle to and fro’ with those ice-cold sodas!
What’s Going on Here
I bet in all of 2007 there weren’t as many people smiling about something as boring as Identity Management than with these three videos. There’s got to be tons of people thinking about whether or not to spend money on that area or not who now think it’s something - shocker! - entertaining to think about.
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’ve got something. I mean, what sounds more fun, more like something you’d like to spend money on: application servers, or whatever bits and bytes crazy Marc Fleury was frothing about.
Mule is a lot more exciting than TIBCO or anything ending with a Q ’cause they have the mad-hatter of ESB entertainment, Dave Rosenberg, at the helm. And I hear the technology ain’t too shabby either. Of course, TIBCO’s no dummies either: they threw up everyone’s favorite Gregg the Architect.
When I used to tell my English teachers that some book (or worse, poem) was boring, they’d spin around at me, throw some grammar books at my head, and say one of those impossibly teen-frustrating things like “no, you’re just too boring to make it interesting!”
Enterprise software marketing is pretty much like that, except without the books to the head.
Disclaimer: Sun and MuleSource are clients. Also, I got a minor in English, and it turns out it really was mostly just boring.
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