By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Guy Kawasaki, How To Drive Your Competition Crazy

Fifteen years ago, in his best-selling book, “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption For Fun and Profit”, business strategy guru Guy Kawasaki provided some excellent guidance for companies in competitive markets looking to differentiate themselves from their competition. His advice: When battling it out, make sure you choose the right enemy.


Oh sure, there were many more bits of wisdom offered up by Kawasaki in his 234-page business strategy book, but the big message is something many companies have yet to understand: Don’t act stupid!

One example of a major player that is both acting stupid and aiming their efforts at an enemy they may regret targeting is Oracle. The company, whose primary offerings are relational database management software systems, is apparently feeling a little threatened by MarkLogic, a much smaller, privately held, software company that has developed a different — read: potentially better — way of managing data and making it actionable by those who need to gain knowledge and insight from large sets of information.

The MarkLogic Server aims to solve an important problem faced by almost every content-heavy organization today: How to manage and act upon (in meaningful ways) the large pool of structured, semi-structured and unstructured content of importance to the organization. MarkLogic Server has gained increasing acceptance in the content industry — and lots of big customers in the vertical markets they target (government, publishing, and entertainment) — by helping organizations see business critical patterns in their content. These patterns are difficult (if not impossible) to detect and visualize from the typical output delivered from a relational database.

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

At the recent MarkLogic User Conference 2010 in San Francisco, several major customers said their goal was to move all of the content they currently store in their relational databases into MarkLogic Server. Each customer shared their stories in the form of a case study presentation. One-by-one, they each made the case for why MarkLogic’s game-changing approach was better for their needs than solutions built upon relational database systems.


Oracle apparently is fearful that MarkLogic is poised to take business away from them. How much business Oracle stands to lose isn’t clear. Certainly not enough to kill off the software giant, but, you’d never know that based on their recent white paper aimed at making MarkLogic look less-than-attractive. This is the stupid part of Oracle’s marketing plan.


Regardless of what you think about relational databases versus other types of database solutions, Oracle’s approach is stupid because they don’t know the difference between choosing a good enemy and a bad one.

Guy Kawasaki

According to Kawasaki, “A bad enemy is usually an upstart — aggressive and hungry and willing to fight viciously. Trying to defeat a small company is risky. If you are successful, the victory is insignificant. If you fail, the embarrassment is huge. There’s more downside than upside in this kind of contest.”


Kawasaki also warns big companies like Oracle that defeating a small firm like MarkLogic may be more difficult because smaller firms can usually “mobilize quickly, change directions on short notice, and fight in a guerrilla war as well as you can.” Losing to MarkLogic, according to Kawasaki’s line-of-thinking, would be “catastrophic” to Oracle.


For MarkLogic this is an excellent opportunity. Big, bad, old-school Oracle is seen picking on a smaller, yet innovative start-up whose ideas are paradigm-shifting. One only has to look to Apple, Kawasaki’s former employer, to see the changes a smaller company can introduce that cause market disruption and change user expectations. This about it: iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad. Small names, big paradigm-shifting, market-disrupting change. These changes have caused consumers to expect more from all vendors, including Apple’s competitors.

Oracle must see MarkLogic as a threat since they are putting so much time, energy and money into combating the much smaller, but more agile and innovative, company.

MarkLogic benefits from all the attention that Oracle draws to the debate between relational databases and those powered by MarkLogic Server, which takes advantage of XQuery. For MarkLogic, Oracle is the perfect enemy because, as Kawasaki pointed out about Apple identifying IBM as their enemy early in the company history, a good enemy is “fundamentally opposed” to your business vision.

MarkLogic is quick to address Oracle’s claims and to take advantage of the spotlight Oracle shined on MarkLogic and its products.

Kawasaki says start-ups like MarkLogic (which he calls upstarts) are companies striving to join the leaders. They are active, opportunistic aggressors who fight a zero-sum game with the leaders: that is, their gain is the leaders’ loss, and their loss is the leaders’ gain. So, for MarkLogic, disrupting the marketplace is to their advantage. They make a very bad enemy for Oracle because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.


Kawasaki says these types of marketing tactics just lead to “tit-for-tat” combat and that instead, companies like Oracle should focus on serving their customers, instead of focusing on the competition.


McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc, used to say focusing on the customer, not the competition is the way to succeed in the marketplace.


“My way of fighting the competition is the positive approach,” Kroc said. “Stress your own strengths, emphasize quality, service, cleanliness, and value, and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up.”


In this day and age, I think Kroc’s advice — and Kawasaki’s strategic guidance — is solid advice that many information technology software and service providers would be wise to heed it.

Two views on the current state of Joomla!

• Wither thou goest Joomla! …  read full article
• The competition Joomla is losing is the one it’s not in … read full article

Thanks to the contestmeister Jon Marks (aka @McBoof) over at his Jon on Tech blog. Nothing like some late night wine-fueled giggles amongst some of the sharpest & funniest content management gurus.

A great bunch of people – even the competitors. Who I whomped. Twice.

By now, many of us are excited to see the finalists for this year’s Packt Publishing Open Source CMS (Content Management System) Award competition, the annual contest in which dozens of companies compete to be highlighted as the year’s finest Content Management System.

Entering its fourth year, this competition has grown nearly five-fold and is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the CMS industry. But as successful as the competition has become, it sadly suffers from inherent issues which prevent it from truly presenting today’s gamut of CMS choices in a valuable way.

Here is the reason: to even be considered as a finalist in the competition, each CMS is judged on exactly one condition: community vote counts. Granted, this can be a valid measure of a CMS’s success, however today’s CMS environment is very polarized. We see large majorities of people using Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress, often simply because those are the CMSs in the headlines.

As a result, these CMSs are naturally going to have far more votes in every competition – they are votes from people who already use these CMSs and who rarely branch out to explore alternatives. This self-fulfilling cycle ensures that these few CMSs continue to dominate our headlines, simply because they were the early winners and can rely on their present install-base for votes, rather than relying on the merits, features, and usability of their own systems in comparison with other CMSs.

read more

Yesterday more industry buzz about some of the shifts and disruption in the ranks of the ECM/CMS world – including a couple of comments about my new role as CMO at Nuxeo.

First some good questions posed by Ron Miller, in an editorial for FierceContentManagement: “Does the Open Source Label Still Matter?”

…and then some thought-provoking comments from Tony Byrne in his Trendwatch blog for CMSWatch, “Software Empires Striking Back”.

After thinking to myself, “Whoa, like, no pressure, eh?” and crawling out from under the covers, I sat down and really thought about what kind of shift is going on out there.

• Ron is right – the product is the product is the product. Peel back the layer of ‘brand’ and ‘voice’ and ‘label’ and ultimately the issue is that business people are choking on content overload and want things to get better. Good product has to find the audience who needs it. Good product should not have any hidden surprises or catches when someone wants to use it. Good product deserves to be used without the hoops and loops and nightmarish license negotiation and oh-so-predictable quarterly discounting charades that is pervasive across most segments of the enterprise software business. If you like what Nuxeo produces, you just go get it. Here, in fact: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/downloads . Tell them I sent you..because like Ron says, this is how I’ll be judged

• Tony is right – Better story-telling doth not make for better software. But good software that doesn’t have a good story is a tree falling in the forest. Nuxeo has invested in an ECM foundation that was built for this century – not the last one. Yeah, yeah, we scale big for lots of content and lots of users… but guess what? we scale really lean and small and skinny too. We’ve entered the world of mobile, social, decentralized enterprises. And their needs are new. This is the part that made me go “hmm” when I started learning about the Nuxeo offering. And beyond story-telling, I’m heads down figuring out the priorities for lead gen, analyst relations, product branding, launch checklists, learning a new WCM application and helping expand the North American team.

So do does the label “open source” matter? Well, yes, but not for the usual reasons. Ultimately feature for feature Nuxeo needs to compete on how good it is, not because it has open source as its development and licensing model. Companies in the information economy have specific ECM needs – we have to meet those requirements to do our job.

Where it *does* matter, however, is the inherent flexibility the open source model gives, because Nuxeo is committed to innovation. Our own core development is augmented by partners and customers – it is the living breathing example of the social marketplace in action. The barriers to customer engagement and evolving requirements disappear. Cost and time to market become an advantage as we keep up with the shift in how content is created and consumed across enterprise.

I really recommend you read some of our CEO’s thoughts on why this business model works – here’s Eric’s blog: http://blogs.nuxeo.com/ebarroca/ or follow him on twitter @ebarroca.

Yes, yes I did.

Was honoured to be invited to represent Open Text on the annual AIIM Vendor Panel Showdown this week. Moderated by the energetic and thought-provoking Dan Elam, the audience had the opportunity to hear first hand from senior management from the big guys: Open Text, IBM and EMC.

Why the odd blog title today? On Tuesday I strolled through Reading Terminal Market on my lunch break from the show. Lo and behold just around the corner from the most excellent Hershel’s East Side deli was a floral shop with buckets and buckets of lovely daisies and gerbera. Our Bloom team at Open Text has adopted the white daisy as our personal commitment to the Enterprise 2.0 program we launched last year. It’s a symbol of spring, flourishing, unleashing potential, of hope and renewal. I twittered jokingly about whether I should stick one in my hair for the vendor panel.

So I bought some. And I stuck one in an empty water glass and brought it up to the panel podium with me. It was my personal reminder to speak the language of the customers in the room. To tone down the buzzword bingo jargon speak, to do my best to be authentic, honest and represent my company credibly.

It reminded me to talk about what’s important in the ECM world. That compliance is a natural outcome of doing good business. That the human voice is important. That getting users engaged with the system and USING IT is the best metric of success. And I was really glad to read some of the backchannel tweetstream comment favorably on my approach.

And it reminded me to look at the positive. I didn’t want to bait the competition by answering the very last question about why I would discount a competitor and not worry about them. The other two companies are forces to be reckoned with in the ECM world, and have successful customer deployments just as Open Text does. I have too much respect for my former colleagues who now work with those companies, and for many of my recent new colleagues who have come from those organizations.

A strong, educated diverse vendor community demonstrates health of the industry. I wasn’t in the mood for a pot shot.