Opinion
Drupal is a young adult
In my DrupalCon Paris presentation I talked about what it means for Drupal to grow up -- and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit more in this blog post. I hope that the analogy that I'll use in this post can provide a framework for thinking and discussion about it.
We, as a community, are growing up and there is not much you can do about it.
If you're my age (currently 30 years old), sometimes you remember how great it was when you were in your teens. Unfortunately, you have no choice to grow up: you can't roll back time nor freeze it. I think this will ring true with most of us, and frankly, the same is true for Drupal: Drupal is growing up, and we have no choice but to grow along with it. Growing up is inevitable. Life changes every day and excessive nostalgia kills happiness.
So if Drupal is growing up, where is it in its life?
For me, Drupal is a young adult in the early phases of its professional career. Drupal is fresh out of college with A-grades, did some highly-visible internships while in college, landed its first job in a high-profile company, and built up some initial work experience. He has everything it takes to become successful, but being a junior team member, hasn't yet proven himself in a big way. He has the raw talent to become a key part of the business. In fact, his first promotion is just weeks away, and it remains to be seen how he'll handle some additional responsibilities. Either he is happy with his life as it is, and takes it the easy way, or, instead, embarks on a bigger career path in a somewhat naive but admirable desire to conquer the world.
But, enough with the analogies. For Drupal, growing means we must continue to innovate at the framework layer by improving our code, our tools and our developer workflows. We have to continue to do what we have been doing the best. But, there is also a really big "and" that is key to us growing up ...
As a community, we have to embrace increasingly more end-users, content editors, designers, usability experts and organizations. It may sound obvious, but we have to learn to build software for the people that are our users, rather than mainly designing for ourselves like we've always historically been doing. We, developers, should be the primary target audience of "Drupal: the developer framework" and we should continue to invest heavily in it. But end-users, and content editors in particular, have to be the primary audience of "Drupal: the content management system". Both areas have to thrive and work together. We can either succeed at making that happen with a somewhat naive but admirable desire to conquer the world, or we can fail at making that happen and remain insignificant in the bigger picture.
There is a lot of richness in the Drupal platform that we haven't really figured out how to package in order to reach many more people. Drupal 7 will hopefully be a big help with that, but we'll need to continue that trend with Drupal 8 and beyond. Doing so may provide some initial discomfort as we break out of our traditional mindsets, but it is also tremendously exciting. It's like getting a promotion.
At the end of the day, it is all part of growing up and part of Drupal's natural evolution as a product and technology. Growing up is inevitable -- you can't freeze time. Part of growing is learning to take on more and bigger problems. It is no coincidence that the biggest challenges tend to be ahead of you. This is true for your personal life as well as for the life of an Open Source project. Being a young adult is one of the most exciting times of life, and is filled with lots of changes. What's not to like?
Maybe in a few year's time, I'll write about how Drupal is getting married, and that they are talking about getting kids. ;-)
State of Drupal (September 2009)
Two weeks ago at DrupalCon Paris, I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is available from archive.org, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 8 MB) as well.
I don't want to give away the spoiler, but essentially, the state of Drupal is strong. :) We should be really proud of what we have accomplished with Drupal 6, and what we're about to accomplish with Drupal 7. In the presentation, I also talk about what it means for Drupal to grow up, and what the next phase of our life will most likely look like.
CIOs are starting to take notice of Drupal
Drupal.org recently featured a detailed use case about InterMedia Outdoors switching to Drupal. InterMedia Outdoors boasts a network of 16 websites, a portfolio of 15 magazines, 25 market-leading television productions, 2 syndicated radio shows, and more.
What the use case didn't mention is that they are migrating off of FatWire, a proprietary web content management system (WCMS) that is Forrester's current poster child in the Q2 2009 Forrester Wave for "Web Content Management For External Sites". To me, that is the most interesting part because it means that Drupal is starting to disrupt traditional web content management systems, including the leading ones.
In other words: CIOs are starting to take notice of Drupal.
Many of the proprietary content management systems are difficult to customize, expensive, hard to set up, and slow to adopt new trends. Contrast that to an Open Source solution like Drupal and you get the exact opposite: all the code is made available, anyone can change it, it is very extensible, well documented, and massively adopted. Developers are plentiful, it is bleeding edge, and best of all, there is no license fee -- which matters a great deal in today's economy.
Furthermore, on the business side, Open Source companies get a ton of sales and marketing for free while proprietary vendors presumably have to put more resources into sales and marketing. In other words, Open Source companies should be able to win on all fronts: technology, sales, and marketing. And we do -- I see it in the Drupal community every day.
But no matter how many times we've whacked proprietary vendors over the head with a foam clue bat, some still think that open source is a fad. That is why it is good to see organizations move from proprietary systems to Open Source solutions.
Excited about this event, I reached out to Howard Stevens, the CIO of InterMedia Outdoors. In an e-mail conversation, he asserted the following:
"The primary reason that we selected Drupal is the extensive flexibility that it provides us to enhance our sites over time. While we are very excited about the launch of In-Fisherman, we also recognize that it is a work in progress--the digital media landscape is evolving so quickly it was important for us to implement a content management system that enables us to continually improve our sites without the constraint of vendor roadmaps and proprietary code. The transparency of Drupal’s source code and engaged developer community ensures that any deficiencies in the code are quickly discovered and remedied, new features can be developed as necessary, and we will always retain the flexibility to keep our sites on the cutting-edge."
While use cases like InterMedia Outdoors are really helpful in convincing CIOs, we need to think about more and different ways to encourage CIOs to abandon their proprietary web content management systems. A common misconception among CIOs is that Open Source solutions require a lot more customization and development than proprietary CMS solutions. Howard Stevens wrote:
"One of the hurdles that dissuaded us from implementing Drupal originally was our very small in-house development team. The promise of an out-of-the-box proprietary solution was appealing as it seemingly mitigated the majority of the development risk and complexity. In reality, Drupal was much more effective at helping us manage those risks ..."
The reality is that with 4000+ contributed modules, Drupal has access to a lot more pre-built functionality than any proprietary CMS. Additionally, the number of developers who actively develop in Drupal combined with the number of developers who possess the prerequisite skills (and the plethora of published materials on developing in Drupal) greatly outnumbers the skilled resources with knowledge of nearly every proprietary CMS.
The point here, is that CIOs often look at Drupal differently than developers do. It is less about the technology, and more about finding ways to save time and money and to mitigate risks. Personally, I think the combination of commercial-grade support, Drupal distributions, electronic services and a healthy ecosystem of expert Drupal shops are key in removing barriers for CIOs. Other barriers to overcome include lack of a roadmap (I don't want to fix that), licensing issues (increasingly better understood), training and certification, and of course, functional gaps.
Personally, I'm most interested in identifying the functional gaps because closing those is what the Drupal community excels at. Whatever the functionality gaps, I'm confident we'll close them over time. If you're a proprietary vendor, you can't say we didn't gave you an advance warning. ;-)
State of Drupal presentation (March 2009)
Last week at DrupalCon DC I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation in front of 1400 Drupalistas. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 20 MB) as well. The video is available in alternative encoding formats from archive.org. Topics I talked about: the history of Drupal, the Drupal 7 release, the future of Drupal, etc. Have a look!
Source: archive.org.
My predictions for 2009
It is that time of year again. Time to reflect on 2008, and to put on my Drupal Nostradamus hat and look forward to 2009. But first of all, thanks for 2008! It's been a pretty crazy ride.
Drupal
My personal Drupal highlights for 2008 include the Drupal 6 release (the best Drupal release ever!), both DrupalCon Boston and DrupalCon Szeged, the Drupal.org redesign that is in progress, and, of course, beating Joomla and Wordpress at the Packt awards. ;-) As I predicted last year, more than ten books were written about Drupal, compared to a single book in 2007. The increase in Drupal books is another highlight as I actively helped connect authors to publishers. I truly enjoyed being part of the Drupal community in 2008.
My personal low for 2008 is regret that some key modules lagged behind the Drupal 6 release. The majority of these modules have now been released, and Drupal 6 is finally getting on the fast lane now. The message is clear: we'll continue to see tremendous growth and adoption in 2009.
Why?
- Drupal 6 is easier to use, runs faster, and comes with many great new features. The work we did on Drupal 6 throughout 2007 and 2008 will pay off in 2009.
- Economic pressure will help accelerate Drupal's growth, and that of Open Source in general. More site owners will discover that with Drupal, you can build a better website cheaper than with many of its proprietary counterparts.
- Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time. Drupal continues to be in that sweet spot.
I'll continue to have a software love affair with Drupal in 2009. At the moment, I'm very excited about the community's growing interest in the semantic web -- and all the related interoperability and decentralization technologies. The seed of what I hope will become a strong marriage between Drupal and semantic web technologies was planted in my DrupalCon Boston 2008 keynote in February (with the help, hard work and preparation of many others), and will continue to grow in 2009. Drupal continues to be a technology pioneer in 2009.
I predict that Drupal 7 will be released in the fourth quarter of 2009. The two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core will be custom content types and radical improvements in usability. To reduce the risk of important modules falling behind in support or update path, a significant portion of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) related modules will move to core and we'll pave the way for the Views modules. The same holds true for other important contributed modules, including token module, path auto module, and image handling functionality. In 2009, core becomes bigger, not smaller. The Drupal 7 code freeze will be longer than expected regardless our new continuous test framework, and the upgrade path to Drupal 7 will be more painful than hoped for. But like always, we'll come out stronger than before ...
Despite Drupal being loved by many, we'll have to work hard in 2009. The thing that holds Drupal back is failure to execute many of the ideas and plans that we have. As a community, we need to grow more mentors in 2009, and we must all make sure that they are set up for success rather than failure. The community's responsibility to itself should be to remove barriers to participation and single points of failure. Alarm bells should go off when there is a desire to introduce red tape, unnecessary hurdles or dependencies, or when we fail to collaborate and make progress in key areas of the project. At the same time, we need to help more Drupal companies figure out how to contribute back to Drupal in substantial ways. Contributions are gold, talk is silver. Helping people contribute must become platinum.
Last year, I predicted that we would see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. I believe that prediction was correct. The "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) continued to grow in 2008, while many of the other systems faded into the background a bit. I think that trend will continue in 2009. In the long run, the winners will be platform providers that enable people to connect, create and share value in different ways -- and that do so with the lowest barrier to entry. Expect other systems to (continue to) attack Drupal from both below and above. We're the best platform today, and others will have to move in to stay viable.
Oh, and IBM starts to embrace Drupal in 2009!
Acquia
I'm proud of Acquia. Acquia is the Drupal company that I started with Jay Batson. We announced the start of Acquia at the end of November 2007, and we announced our funding just before the end of 2007. People had a lot of questions about Acquia early in 2008, but throughout the year we demonstrated over and over again that we're committed to Drupal's success and that we want to do what is right for the community. We built a great team and grew from 2 employees early in the year to 30 people today. In September 2008, we launched our first products and started to offer commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. Today, 3 months after we opened to doors for business, we are serving customers. We worked hard and made our milestones. It has been fun to see a new business take off. I also racked up way more frequent flyer points (i.e. air miles) than what is generally considered healthy.
The first thing you learn when selling in tough economic times is that you must figure out how to give customers exactly what they want and you must do it fast. It didn't take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x -- all modules, themes and custom code. The good news is that Acquia is a nimble company so the last weeks we worked on changing our support model to address customer demands. Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code. I'm still a firm believer in Drupal distributions so Acquia Drupal still has a role as a packaged on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. However, anyone will be able to connect any Drupal 6.x site to the Acquia Network -- helping us achieve our goal of helping people build and operate great websites with Drupal. Keep an eye on acquia.com if you want to learn more about these changes.
We're passionate about getting our value proposition right, so expect us to continue to tweak and extend our current offering in 2009. We'll also launch a number of new products. Some, like our hosted search service, we've already talked about, and I think we'll finally be ready to talk about a few others in the first quarter of 2009.
Regardless of the down-turn in the economy, I think that Acquia's business will continue to take off nicely in 2009. My heart and gut are convinced that Acquia has a tremendous opportunity to do well, and to do good. I believe (and hope) that Acquia will have the success it takes to continue to invest in Drupal.
Mollom
Together with Benjamin Schrauwen, I also launched Mollom, a web service whose purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping websites free of spam and the quality of user-generated content high. Mollom is a self-funded company and nowhere near the size or scope of Acquia (Acquia is my full-time commitment) but nevertheless, a lot of progress has been made. We announced Mollom in March, and opened the doors for business at the end of September 2008. Today, we're actively protecting 4,500 websites of which 75-100 have paid subscriptions. Mollom has caught almost 21 million spam messages since it started.
In 2009, I predict that Mollom will continue to experience steady growth and that we'll introduce a premium subscription (i.e. "Mollom Premium" in addition to "Mollom Plus" and "Mollom Free") with enterprise level features. I also predict that our efficiency in blocking spam will raise from our current 99.88% (i.e. 12 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught) to 99.95% or more (i.e. 5 in 10,000 spam messages or less were not caught). While this might sound like a marginal improvement, it actually means we make 2.4 times fewer mistakes.
Mollom has a ton of potential and is great fun, so I have all reasons to believe that 2009 will be a good year for Mollom. If fact, I predict that 'good' will be an understatement.
Conclusion
2008 was a great year, and continues Drupal's great run. The economic realities of 2009 will present challenges, but also opportunities. I believe Drupal's success will continue -- and accelerate -- in 2009, though we'll have to work hard. I predict we'll do exactly that.
Open Source and Free Puppies
Seth Gottlieb reported that Annie Weinberger of Interwoven, a proprietary CMS vendor, launched some good old Open Source FUD comparing Open Source to a free puppy:
"We look differently at the cardboard box full of free puppies outside the super market once we become adults. As children what could be more fun than to get a puppy who is going to be your friend for life? Why not mom…it’s FREE!! But as adults we have learned the truth. We know that taking home that puppy is going to cost us in the end. The free price tag hides all the costs we are going to spend on food, training, shots, and a new couch once the puppy discovers you are not coming home at 5:00 every night to walk him. Open source WCM solutions are very similar. The free price tag is attractive at first, but for online strategies that have multiple initiatives (intranet, extranet, portal, landing pages, micro-sites, etc.), the hidden fees lie in the heavy customization, maintenance and engineering work."
Puppy analogies -- especially those with free puppies -- are powerful stuff.
Is Open Source more expensive than proprietary systems? It depends. You can't generalize. Open Source implementations can be more expensive if you try to bend the software too much. However, you don't have to be a genius to understand that because there are no licensing costs, Open Source has the potential to be much cheaper than proprietary solutions, and that Open Source solutions come with freedom and flexibility not found in proprietary products. Implementation cost is an important factor, but it is in providing freedom and flexibility that Open Source wins and commercial vendors lose. Open Source puppies are "free" as in "free speechbark".
One thing is for sure: puppies attract attention; these days, Open Source does as well and proprietary vendors tend to be of the jealous type.
The great thing about FUD, though, is that it validates our work in the Open Source community. Blog posts like Annie's trigger the competitive gene in hundreds of Open Source developers around the world, and in the end, makes Drupal stronger.
A free puppy, anyone?
The freemium business model: giving away pays
I've recently been thinking a lot about the freemium business model. For those unfamiliar with the freemium business model, it was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2006:
"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."
I've been thinking about the freemium business model because, inspired by Drupal and Open Source, both my companies, Acquia and Mollom, use a freemium business model. (Technically, Acquia uses an Open Source business model which is different from the freemium business model, but there is plenty of overlap and similarities -- pointing out the differences could be a blog post and discussion on its own.)
At Acquia, we currently provide community subscriptions for free -- people that want help with Drupal installation and configuration can get free support from Acquia's Drupal experts. While our free support is limited to certain channels (i.e., forum only), certain support questions (i.e., no module development help and no security best practices) and comes without response time guarantees, we have people on staff whose full-time job is to help you (example customer story). Further, we invest heavily in Drupal and give those contributions away for free.
Similarly, at Mollom, our basic spam filtering service is available for free to sites with limited post volumes. Our free website protection service provides all the features of our commercial Mollom Plus product, but is limited in the number of posts it will protect each day and in its access to our high-availability back-end infrastructure. The great majority of our Mollom clients are using our free filtering service with great success.
There are a number of things that attract me to the freemium business model. The first, and certainly foremost, is the opportunity to do “good” and “well” at the same time. It’s a great thing to help people build quality websites with Drupal, and it’s a great thing to provide Mollom to help deal with spam. Second, I believe a company is better off with a large install base than a small install base, even if the majority of clients ride free. A large install base translates to direct and indirect network effects, including efficient marketing, greater brand awareness, the collective intelligence of your users, and faster product adoption. And, last, I strongly believe that a successful company built on the freemium business model is simply a stronger and more defensible business in the long run.
The freemium business model is relatively new because it didn't become a serious option until the internet gave us a low-cost distribution channel. Ultimately, I can't help but think the freemium business model is the business model of the future for the sole reason that it puts the customer first. With the freemium business model customers only have to pay when they get significant value from the software (i.e. they have reached the limits of the free version). Compare this to the current model where people have to pay to get access to the bits, or where people have to pay before they got enough value from the software (e.g. most shareware software).
That all sounds great but you have to make the freemium business model work first. Getting free users to convert to paying customers is hard. Conversion rates of less than 1% are not uncommon. Free is often “good enough” and only a few people choose to pay for additional features and services. You have to put enough value in the free version to drive adoption (so that you get the scale and the network effects that derive from it), while providing enough incentive for people to pay for premium features or services. The marketing and sales funnel is really wide at the top, and very narrow at the bottom. Plus, you have to make sure that the paying users subsidize all the free users.
Achieving the right balance between free and paid customers is difficult and requires close attention to a number of variables. As a result, I've been trying to answer questions like: how much should we invest to acquire additional free users? How do you estimate the value of a free user? What is the cost of a free user? How long does it take for a free user to convert to a paying customer, and how many will do so? What are the triggers that convince free users to convert?
For example, in Mollom's case, one could argue that we get thousands of dollars worth of value from free users already. We currently have more than 3,000 active users that use Mollom for free. Say each user spends on average 15 minutes a week moderating his site's content and reporting classification errors to Mollom. Mollom learns from this feedback and automatically adjusts its spam filters so that all other Mollom users benefit from it. At a rate of $10 USD/hour, we get $390,000 USD worth of value from free users a year -- 3,000 users x 15 minutes/week x 52 weeks/year x 10 USD/hour = $390,000 USD/year. If these numbers hold up, the value of a free Mollom user could be estimated at $130 USD/year. And that doesn't include the marketing value they add. That said, the value of a free user probably declines as you get more of them and the business becomes stronger.
Both Acquia and Mollom have just opened for business so we have a ton to learn. It will be interesting to look at the different variables and questions a year from now, and to see what we have learned. I hope we can make it work so we can do good and well at the same time ...
