17 February 2009 · marketing, python

I was pushed into thinking about open source adoption by another thoughtful Seth Godin blog post today. Seth points out that decisions are not always made in the way we'd like to think they are. We know that open source makes sense, but people still refuse to adopt it for what we in the open source world tend to consider irrational reasons. But of course a) people aren't always rational, and b) even when they are, they have motivations we may be unaware of, or (more likely) paying insufficient attention to.

This brings up a point that's commonly known in the commercial sales world and almost completely ignored by the open source community. We focus way too much on the wonderful feature set of our "products", and nowhere near enough on the needs of our "customers". So when you visit python.org for your first introduction to the language, you learn

Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days. Many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains and feel the language encourages the development of higher quality, more maintainable code.

The potential adopter isn't bothered about the features of open source software, they need to know the benefits. In other words, what's in it for them? A first-cut rework might read

Python lets you get more programming done faster, and helps you integrate your systems more effectively. You can train your existing programmers to use Python and see almost immediate gains in productivity and lower expenditures on maintenance.

Now I don't claim to be a marketing professional, but even I can see that this addresses the problems of the user more directly than the current text. A lot of open source people see the word "marketing" and shriek because they perceive it as being intimately connected with the world of proprietary products and commercial licensing. Which it is, but it doesn't have to be. There's no reason at all why open source and free software shouldn't take a page from the proprietary book and start marketing itself more aggressively.

In fact I like that blurb so much it's going straight into the Holden Web Python training page! I just know that someone properly trained in marketing could do much, much better. If the goal is to get more people to adopt Python, what's wrong with using the best techniques from the proprietary world and bending them to our own ends?