Ecology, Communities and Platform Adoption

Got a note yesterday from Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, below:

Want to see the next generation of game design? Will Wright's Spore demo from GDC is one of the most amazing game design demos I have ever seen. Procedurally generated world and inhabitants that pass along genetic traits. Amazing stuff! Viewing this video requires you entering your name and e-mail. It's an hour long, but you can skip around. Enjoy!

It's definitely worth a peek - shots of the audience are as interesting as the presenter.

On a (barely) related note, we're seeing more and more momentum behind what we see as our ecosystem of strategic communitites, driving Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice/StarOffice, NetBeans, the Java community and the OpenSolaris/Solaris community. All, interestingly, appear to be accelerating (and having just signed one of the largest industrial companies on earth to a global Solaris site license (across all x64 platforms, displacing the leading alternative - and not just their requisite failed Linux implementation on a mainframe), we're feeling pretty positive about the revenue equations, too).

We're seeing a growing number of defectors coming back (the Eclipse defections are especially gratifying). As an example, the graphic below shows a rank ordering of the popularity of the NetBeans.org site vs. Eclipse.org, IBM's tools site.

The NetBeans community has pretty much caught up - and is on a path to keep up the momentum.

If it wasn't obvious, blogs (coupled with extraordinary innovation) are playing a central role in driving community awareness and adoption - of all these platforms. Blogs put a human, and real-time, face on communities, their participants and community evolution.

As will become more obvious by the day, you can compete against a product, but it's close to impossible to compete against a community.

It's no coincidence that as we enter our most aggressive product cycle ever, an understanding of ecology, ecosystems and community development will once again be at the core of our strategy.

Posted on 08:05AM May 28, 2005 |

Share this post  | | | | | |