Marketing Teachers

In the late 1980’s my then fiance (now spouse) Pauline and I spent a Christmas holiday in Venezuela, in a beautiful beach resort. And while we were enjoying the sunshine at the side of a luxury hotel pool and drinking fantastic cocktails, I was reading “Ogilvy on Advertising“. Strange as it may sound, I could not wait to get back to the dreary Holland winter to start applying the lessons.

Up to then my reference for marketing genius was Egbert van Bel, my collegue and friend, who had an uncanny ability to turn day-to-day stories into highly newsworthy press material.

I was at Ashton-Tate in these days, but soon after Borland acquired us. The first Borland employee I encountered was Marc Randolph, Borland’s VP of Direct Marketing. He was the first person I met of whom I thought he was off-the-charts smart. He built the marketing engine for Borland that Lotus could not defeat and that was seriously competing with Microsoft. Marc went on to start Netflix with Reed Hastings, and is now perfecting the skill of being a young and rich retiree. Marc taught me the skill in Holland, and after I moved to the US on a much larger global scale.

Through the Borland acquisition I also got to work with Philippe Kahn, no doubt my biggest influence of all the folks I have encountered. In these years I was witness to the invention of competitive upgrades (to attack Lotus 123), the abandonment of copy protection on software diskettes, $49 dollar pricing for Quattro Pro, and many more examples of his marketing skill. After Borland Philippe founded Starfish which had the rights to Sidekick, a really small software product, and turned it into a $350 million business in 4 years. He repeated a similar trick with Lightsurf, which I admit sounded dumb to me when I first heard it, who would ever want to make photos from a cellphone? He is on to Fullpower now, you should keep an eye on that.

In the years after Borland I have met many more great marketeers as we all try to figure out how to adapt to the impact of Internet and Open Source on marketing. The standouts in terms of impact are The Innovators Dilemma, the Cluetrain, and the Tipping Point. Much of the rest comes from my list in Bloglines.

One of the influencers is without doubt Lon Johnson of PageOnePR. When I was at Red Hat I asked journalist Maureen O’Gara to point me to best PR talent in the open source world, and she did not hesitate a second to recommend Lonn. Now Lonn has made it public that it was he who taught me not to use spamming as a marketing tool. Talk about impact! All those emails not sent! If you did not receive my spam, thank Lonn!

We’ll Know One When We See One

When Harold Goldberg, our new CEO, joined us earlier this year he probed hard for the true definition of an open source company and how it directs our behavior. Having worked in this industry since 2001, I was somewhat embarrassed how vague my answer was.

A recent intense debate in the blogoshere about the topic demonstrates that even the best minds in this industry find it hard to agree on the definition. It started when Nat Torkington asked the question with an eye on who should be invited to OSCON. If you want to track the educated opinions given in response, check these entries by Allison Randal, Matt Asay, Open Source Magazine, Stephen O’Grady (incl follow up), Michael Tieman and Lukas Smith.

In all these entries there is significant agreement about what open source software is. Much less agreement exists about what an open source company is or if it is even important to have such agreement. The strongest argument in favor of the agreement seems to be that a club of members can be created, with bragging rights and a chance to be a presenter at OSCON.

We may find it hard to agree on a definition of an open source company, but in general we all know one when we see one (with the exception of EnterpriseDB?). This phrase was first used by a Supreme Court Justice to indicate that intuition is a valid alternative when a definition is hard to come by. I have full confidence that Nat will be able to use his intuition to get the invitations for OSCON right.

Zend Platform 3.0 Security Updates

If you’re interested in keeping your production environment rock solid, and even if you’re not, you might want to be familiar with the latest security updates we’ve recently provided for Zend Platform.

Two security issues were discovered (courtesy of Stefan Esser, who I’d like to thank) that are related to Zend Platform. These security issues are non-remotely exploitable, it means that they potentially may result in elevation of privileges, and consequently may allow local users to obtain administrative access. That is, these security vulnerabilities require local shell access in order to be exploitable, and cannot be remotely exploitable.

We have provided fixes for these security issues for Zend Platform 2.x. These fixes are already included in Zend Platform 3.0, hence personally I’d recommend of installing/upgrading to Zend Platform 3.0. You can find more information about it at http://www.zend.com/products/zend_platform/security_vulnerabilities

Last but not least, additional security patches, updates and recommendations from Zend can be found here, so keep up to date!

Stay tuned,

Nir

NYPHP and EclipseCon Events

In case you’re in the NY area and you fill like joining a session about the PDT project and Zend Platform 3.0 new features (together with Zend Studio 5.5), come and join us at the NYPHP event, NYC, IBM building @ 590 Madison Avenue, Room 1219 (12th Floor).

Full details are available here: http://www.nyphp.org/content/calendar/view_entry.php?id=105&date=20070227

The second presentation will take place in EclipseCon 2007, Santa Clara, California. This presentation will focus on the PDT project including a demonstration of the different features.

Full details are available here:

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=3720

See you there,

Yossi.

Zend Browsers Toolbar - A Great Tool for Debugging / Profiling

In the last few releases of Zend Studio, we also provided the browsers toolbars and toolbars integration as part of the Studio’s features. The toolbars are available for IE and Firefox browsers.

The toolbar support provides the easiest way to debug or profile your website by a touch of a button.
The best example i can think of is by checking the registration mechanism of your website and initializing a debug session from any editor with the relevant GET/POST parameters is not so easy to accomplish. Instead of all this, all the user needs to do is to select the option to debug the next page from the toolbar and by entering the registration information and submitting the form, the debug session with all the relevant parameters will start in Zend Studio immediately.

Same goes for profiling. Go to your site’s home page (the busiest page probably) and click on the profile button. The profiler results will open immediately in Zend Studio.
In order to illustrate this, I’ve decided to create a demo and to show the simplicity and the easiness of using the toolbars for debugging / profiling your website pages.

The demo is available here: http://files.zend.com/videos/browser_toolbars/.

It’s a great tool, start using it!

If you have any comments or ideas for additional demos, please let me know.

Yossi Leon.

Zend Download Server UNLEASHED

Recently I’ve came back from a customers visits tour, which was very interesting and exciting. I’ve been facing customers real environments and needs and have been discussing their needs. One of the features that I particularly enjoyed discussing was Zend Download Server. This feature *always* created huge interest to customers, due to its cool capabilities. In this blog post I’ll put a spotlight on it so you could also understand how you can potentially benefit from it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Zend Developer Zone

It was fun to see that it was noticed that the weekly summaries of the PHP developer mailing lists resurfaced. In fact they were never gone, but when we started moving the content from the old website to either the new site or to devzone in 2006, we weeklies got somehow left behind in the old section. Steph kept updating them (not exactly weekly, but close), but they were just not that visible.

So now you find them neatly organized on the Zend Developer Zone.

By the way, so are the PHP 101 series, that have been long time favorites of visitors to our site, and which are being updated as we speak. And the PHP manual. And so much more.

No wonder traffic at the devzone is growing as much as it is, with more than 100K unique visitors in December and doubling about every quarter. Take a moment and find out what PHP content there is for you at the Zend Developer Zone.