Real artists ship
If anyone’s missed these excellent posts, I should really point them out.
- Chris DiBona tells us all that the moral is “Don’t Talk. Do. Don’t yammer. Launch. Release. Ship.” He’s right. Look at Microsoft talking about freeing their database, and wanting to release their beloved FoxPro code to the world, via CodePlex. Open source or not, they surely received a lot of positive karma last week. I don’t doubt their delivery aspect of things, but why talk about it before it happens – it means a lot more, doing it first, I’d think. With the possiblity of users expanding on this, maybe someone will work on a FoxPro to MySQL migration suite, that will be feature complete?
- Then Jeremy Zawodny tells us about how silly lame announcements are (really, they are) and we should Shut Up and Ship! Action does speak louder than words. And PR time is cheap, as chips. Talking about future delivery is embarassing (of course, the shit really his the fan when you don’t even deliver, eventually). Most interesting quote: “The(y) feel like the sort of thing you’d get from a politician during an
election year, not a company (or group of companies) hell bent on
delivering something truly amazing and innovative.“
How does this relate to the community around your company/product? In a bad way, quite clearly. The open source way has always been to find an itch, scratch it, release something, then talk about it. Nowadays, it seems that people rather talk about an idea, become itchy with the publicty, attempt to scratch it, and by the time its out to ship, initial interest has already fizzled out.
Steve Jobs is right when he says “real artists ship”. The way Apple release products? Create in secrecy (itch, scratch), release with a big bang (release, then PR), get cult following (seems to work recetly, pretty well).
Its April 01 2007 today. Happy April Fool’s? Happy Birthday Apple – a long 31 years it has been.
