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Tuesday, November 14. 2006FUD as a marketing strategy in the PHP world Anti-Typo3 FUD I was very surprised and disappointed to find a very harshly formulated FUD flyer in my conference bag that was obviously aiming at Typo3. I am talking about the anti-Typo3 tirade that “Flying Dog” uses to lobby their own commercial content management system. I’ve taken the liberty of scanning it and providing you with a rough translation (click thumbnail for a larger view). Basically, it says “Would you entrust your content to these 3Types” on the crimson-red front, showing three bad clip-art mobsters. The cenral mobster turns up on the backside, showing his best gangster face and telling the reader that, “our opensource CMS is complex and can do a lot. It is user friendly for editors and has a lot of extensions: You can do almost everything with these. It has a large community. Apart from that, it’s free, opensource and therefore your first choice. Why use a commercial CMS?” “Man, he’s right”, you might say. I would think so too, and actually this whole statement is entirely true. While you can probably say a lot against Typo3, it has all the features described. The UI needs a little getting used to, but most editors of online media I know are fine with it. Flying Dog software, the vendor of the Powerslave CMS, seems to think differently. They state so on the right side of their flyer, saying “There are modern myths that present themselves as a collective, irrational imagination”. You doggy guys are talking about flying spaghetti monsters, are you? Because good open-source PHP CMSes are not a myth, nor irrational - but they’re certainly modern. Some hints for you: eZ publish, Typo3, Papaya, Joomla. All of them surely have their up- and downsides, but doesn’t any product have these? The last paragraph is a short “feature” list, more or less only marketing speak, with no contradiction or clarification on why the so-called “myths” are mythic at all. It’s ironic, though, to see the last bullet point (above the price): “10 years of experience in the area of conflict of open technologies and commercial software”. There is no argumentative approach to the whole matter at all and I personally feel this flyer to be offensive to anybody who embraces OSS, sells products and suppot based on OSS and helps build OSS. I am quite convinced I will never recommend Powerslave to any one of my customers (I wouldn’t have anyway, Typo3 is fine for most) and the whole marketing campaign leaves a more than stale taste. Is FUD the only way out for commercial vendors? Shouldn’t you find a USP for your product instead of spreading fear amongst your free competitors’ users? Should flying dogs try barking up different trees? (Update: Turns out other blogs (german) have a more positive attitude towards this advertising. Trackbacks
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The question is how the conference organizers allow to add such ads in their bags. But this conference is not a OS conference, it is a commercial conference (not badly meant, it is only a fact), no surprise .
Lets turn it a bit around:
- “The Powerfull PHP Super ECMS” Wow 3 superlatives in one sentence without any founded quote. - “Leading usability through AJAX components” Hmmm AJAX itselfs brings no more usability by itself. It must be used innovative to achive this goal. Also there are many people seeing this as a usability disadvantage. Also thought about security? - “Enterprise proofed in complex projects” Ah interresting. Opensource CMS are also well known as proofed in “Enterprise” environments. Their openess allows customizations to the needs of the customer. I would call that “Enterprise” - “Consequent development including PHP Sourcecode” That doesnt includes that i am allowed to customize. Also other open source CMS are under professional and consequent development driven by companies, like [ATTENTION ADVERTISEMENT] eZ Publish, papaya and many others. - “10 Years expirence between the poles of open technologies and commercial software” Ok, where is the advantage? Many open source projects have developers with the same or even more expirence. Also I assume it as bad when technologies are protected but claim to be open. - “from 16k Euros” Wow, what an argument. Why not investing 16k Euros in the customizing of an open source cms and also benefiting from the constant care of a community also using that improvements? Isnt that better for protecting your investment? What is when they close their doors. Is there someone who can and is allowed to fix your problems? Only fist small private comment from me  .
I was there with Robert and Karsten from the TYPO3 dev crew. This flyer saved our day! It was so comical and funny and frankly I couldn’t have compiled a more condense list of important facts about TYPO3 than they did. We loved it!
I don’t even understand how they imagine their own “featurelist” coming out ahead of TYPO3s. Maybe my german is not good enough. It definitely goes on my trophy shelf that someone consider TYPO3 strong enough to spread FUD against  So we had great fun poking at Frying Dog or Dying Dog or whatever their name is. Anyway, who would entrust their content to a radiocontrolled flying dog?
Huh. ECM-Blog an Blog for commercial verndors? No! It is a independent Blog for Enterprise Content Management - of all licenses. But: I try to be realistic and do not like software just because it is Open Source. That is one reason, why I do not realy like Typo3. It just do not like this frenatic acting of some (or many?) members of the Typo3 community (perhaps especially here in German?).
And Kasper - you are right. Perhaps the “feature comparison” on the flyer is very bad and does not devliver and information. But I just posted the image - and *do not support the campaign*. I just thing it is a *funny way to get in discussion with potential wcm-users*. Open Source software has to be in any solutions selection process - to see if it fits to the definied needs. Often it does - often it does not. Flying Dog is - in some way - *very well compareable with Typo3*. Both are well developed frameworks for web applications and no really “out-of-the-box WCMS” (yes, thats my opinion about Typo3, you may have different opinions - thats okay. I know hundrets of WCMS and there are so much much much better out-of-the-box WCMS...). Flying Dog is technologically and functionally a bit ahead of Typo3 - but its commercial software. So: Take it like Kasper. Lough about it, think about it - and do not think anyone will fight with you. Thats no “declaration of war” - it is just a *persiflage of the way some persons here in Germany promote Typo3*. And: I like Typo3! Yeah, really! I like it! But even Typo3 must be questionable - like any other WCMS (or even any other software) available. And again: *ECM-Blog is not blog for commercial vendors*. It is a independent blog with both (and more) views at the market. Even it is running on Open Source (like any other website of mine)!
Huh back. From the context of your blog entry regarding said flyer and another entry titled “Ten things that tell you you’re using the wrong WCMS”, I would have guessed that your attitude towards Typo3 is a bit more critical than towards, say, Imperia or Powerslave.
Anyway, I’ll just take it that you’re running a noncommercial, independent blog (like I am, FWIW). Nobody needs to like any software just for its freeness, I’m far from doing that. I actually like Typo3 because I have been using it quite a lot over the last years, it seems (now) quite mature and there have yet to be extremely severe security problems. The community is quite active, very forthcoming and large. It’s fun to work with, but so are Papaya, eZ and even some commercial systems I know. I kinda liked Chairman and even Imperia’s not that bad. Anyway, I don’t condone preferral of one system over another just because it is free - anyone should be able to choose what does the job best. While the campaign at hand is fairly pathetic (as Kasper pointed out so ironically), the general idea of using FUD as a marketing concept is not that funny after all. It shows a lack of respect for competitors (which I would be able to forgive) and a lack of arguments for the own cause. If I’m not able to bring up a different USP for my product than “it’s not free”, I just don’t put flyers into conference bags. But that’s just me. A price tag is just not an eyecatcher for me and I think it isn’t for a lot of the other conference attendees. Apart from the obvious fact that somehow the whole flyer must have been some kind of in-joke between flying dog and their target audience, I just don’t get the sentence that says, “There are modern myths that present themselves as a collective, irrational imagination”. What’s that supposed to mean? Is Open Source a myth? What exactly is irrational here? The true irony behind all this is that flying dog based their flyer on the concept of trust. Honestly, I can say (and I think the flying dog people know exactly what I am talking about) that currently I trust Typo3 a whole lot more than PowerSlave. And I haven’t even seen Powerslave’s administrative interface. It’s just the frontend that scares me off. I’m not a fanboy, I have made an honest effort to give other WCMS a try, and I’m not even that proficient with Typo3. I would speak up for any OSS software that’s made a target of marketing blah in this way - apart from phpNuke, that is. There is, however, a limit to what I find funny, and bashing OSS to promote your own product is definitely not in my book of good jokes.
Flying Dog is allowed to put those dumbass ads into the conference bags, because they deal with Software & Support. Powerslave is used by S&S to run all their websites (I was the former webmaster and programmer in chief of S&S, so I know what I’m talking about).
I don’t know TYPO3 much, but Powerslave sucks. It’s so complex, bad documented and the code itself is crap (with parts originally introduced in PHP3 and so on). If you don’t pay thousands of euros to get teached by one of the FDog employees, you’ll be lost.
NO matter on the code quality or the products quality now, i hvae had the same issue with systems that are java, licensed by CPU or USERS and from the open source point of view (i am develloping on OS CMS myself) sometimes youre missing the point how less money 16k euros are.
I think if the typo3 community just shuts a bit up about the whole thing, in the end its a good thing for typo. It shows that even the old school of CMS companies, and that is flying dog, as stated they are around since php3, fear the OS market. Anyway i guess the t3 stuff IS too overhyped as well as other cmses are. Its a matter of fact that there is a special interest target group for the most OS cms systems and a special target for each commercial System. Sharing the market is better than hitting each others ass. When the OS cms community understands that it can start to laugh about the commercial systems.
Code quality does matter. Thinking of security holes, performance and possibilities new technique makes aviable to you and your software (e.g. PDO instead of my self coded outdated sql-wrapper class).
I think you’re missing the point here. We’re not going against the fact that commercial CMSes are commercial - hell no. Everyone has to earn their living here and including me, a lot of my readers are professional software developers. So, nobody is condemned for publishing a product that is not open source, free and politically correct.
However, what I (and I think a couple of other people here) dislike is the fact that one specific commercial vendor tries to leverage the advantages of open source against OSS projects and attempts to discredit the whole open-source paradigm. And that is (per definition coined for MS) FUD. Powerslave’s (and Typo3)’s qualities can be argued. Blind fanatism is never a good thing, in neither direction. I can see that people who are obviously informed about Powerslave from a developer’s or administrator’s point of view argue that this CMS leaves something to be desired. Also, I know of a lot of people that have a huge stack of problems in Typo3 that makes them dislike this system. Typo3.org doesn’t run around screaming “closed source is the devil”, though...
I’m neither saying Powerslave or Typo3 are evil, nor open source or closed source software is. I only indicated that Powerslave is not as good as Flying Dog wants to make us believe.
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