Platform Evangelism

An anonymous submitter writes "James Plamondon, a former Microsoft employee is writing a book on Technological Evangelism at Microsoft. He's posted the first chapter, "Evangelism is War." Robert Scoble, a current Microsoft Evangelist doesn't like the metaphor, but Micah Alpern is concerned Microsoft could use similar strategies against Macromedia Flash."

Comments

scary quote in context

[Tumbleweed]

Consider, then, the 'Technical Architect,' and his grand scheme. Yikes. Probably closer to the mark than one would like.

Proven protection against evangelism

[geoff lane]

is to open up your client software. That way you get your code ported to more platforms than you can count... for free.

It's difficult for a company that only really supports one platform to compete against s/w that's in widespread use everywhere.

Opening up netscape five years earlier would have killed IE before it even got started. Real may understand this now, I wonder if Macromedia does yet.

Re:Flash is dead

[kmilani2134]

I think Flash will be around for quite a while as it will be very difficult to get the graphic designers away from their beloved macs and the software they have been using. They tend to be very loyal. How many professional graphic designers use gimp? I would imagine the majority of them continue to use Photoshop. Another thing that is missing with SVG is that the applications for constructing cool SVG animations are still very new and are a long way from having the user interface and maturity of Flash.

I have been keeping an eye on SVG as I really do hope it gains traction and becomes an open standard.

Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone

[BandwidthHog]

Wal-Mart destroyed the competition. And, yes, some say Wal-Mart is evil. But all they did is healthy, normal competition, no?

What they and others do is far beyond competition, much less 'healthy' or 'normal.'

They're coasting on the fact that once you achieve a certain critical mass, you get god-mode in the system. For individuals that condition tends not to last, as they either get booted from their company once things get big, or the novelty wears off and they decide to try it all over again. But for corporations, that's a sustainable state, which turns them into fiscal black holes that swallow everything visible to them.

I've always thought that communism looked good on paper, but just doesn't scale well beyond a few thousand people. So are we seeing a similar limitation with capitalism? Or is Wally World really just so clearly superior to anything else with a cash register?