Ian Howells

I was lucky enough to be Documentum's first employee in Europe in 1993. While there, I worked closely with Geoffrey Moore and got "religion" about understanding not just the so-called "chasm" but the whole marketing model and its implications for strategy, marketing, product, and operational behaviour. I started working with John Newton in the late '80s and we recently discussed marketing models and their relevance to Open Source as well as Geoffrey Moore's new thinking in Darwin and the Demon. This conversation was the root of my thoughts on rules for Open Source marketing - new model, new rules (and some old ones). Many people are familiar with Moore's Technology Adoption LifeCycle (TALC) where everyone dreams of hitting the "Tornado." Early Market - Discontinuous inn... (more)

A Simple Marketing Model for Enterprise Open Source

A year ago I wrote "Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing." At Alfresco we believed that open source was different and needed a different marketing model. Geoffrey Moore was at the root of our thinking when he wrote about "Darwin and the Demon" and markets being ripe for disruption in the form of marketing and business model disruption. We saw that there was no "cookie cutter," sta... (more)

Make Markets Not War

This is the second part of my two-part series on open source market strategies and implementations. I previously outlined the 10 strategy rules for open source marketing and emphasized building new markets, differentiating, contributing, pricing and innovating, and the customer relationship. As I mentioned in part one, a year ago I wrote "Howells' 10 Rules for Open Source Marketing." He... (more)