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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Another reason MS keeps winning
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Ted Leung points out one of the reasons MS keeps winning - they understand marketing, and they glom onto new directions in marketing very, very quickly:
Sara Williams of Microsoft announced the Microsoft is doing a Planet MSDN. Of course, theirs is called blogs.msdn.com, which makes total sense. They are using the weblogs.asp.net infrastructure, and I have to give a lot of credit, because these folks were among the earliest to aggregate blogs for a development community. Maybe they'll fix their infrastructure to do 304 and Gzip.
This led me to think about other commercial development communities, which led immediately to Java. So of course, there is java.blogs, which has been out for a while. weblogs.asp.net is to javablogs.com as blogs.msdn.com is to part of java.net. And indeed java.net is aggregating bloggers. Unfortunately, the blogging activity at java.net is very, very low. If I was a Java engineer, I would be begging my management to let me put some content up on java.net. Among the early adopters, Sun looks distinctly unclueful on this.
I have some sympathy for Sun on this - I've put together a Smalltalk blogging community, and there's no way to force content - all you can do is get interesting people blogging, and hope that the content comes along. On the other hand, Microsoft has done that - they have a very large community of bloggers, both internal and external. They have people like Scoble cheerleading both internally and externally, they have lots of their product managers and project leads blogging - and they've got a growing community of users blogging, mostly about MS stuff (take a look at Sam Gentile's excellent blog, for example). Now go back and look at Sun - as Ted says, it looks pathetic
The Smalltalk community's efforts are as big as I can manage on my own - I created the blog server for this site, I'm writing BottomFeeder - it's fulltime work. With that said, anyone that wants a Smalltalk oriented blog should contact me. I can get you set up quickly, and I'm on the lookout for more community bloggers.
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