Predictions
Drupal 2009 retrospective and 2010 predictions
It's that time again. Time to look back at 2009, and to look forward to 2010.
In my 2009 predictions for Drupal, I was pretty much spot on -- except for the Drupal 7 release date. I predicted that the two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core would be custom content types and radical improvements in usability, that a number of important contributed modules would move into core, and that core would embrace the semantic web. I hoped that our community remained strong, and it did. Our community is our biggest asset and Drupal 7 wll be our best release yet, and I'm very proud of both. We accomplished much by working together in 2009, and I'm very confident of what we can -- and will -- do in 2010.
On a personal level, 2009 was a very busy Drupal year. I posted 3,269 comments on drupal.org (up from 1758 comments in 2008), and committed 1,567 patches (up from 1,031 patches in 2008). I accepted many more speaking engagements that evangelize our work, wrote more blog posts (215 blog post in 2009, up from 183 in 2008), and more.
My two personal Drupal highlights for 2009 include Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal and the automated testing that we deployed on drupal.org. In fact, having now experienced its benefits, I'm not sure how we ever developed without automated testing in the past. The current Drupal 7 development snapshot feels more stable than the initial Drupal 6.0 release (minus obvious exceptions like no working upgrade path). Automated testing improved our development velocity as we committed many more core patches than any previous year. Other highlights include the many Drupal books that were published, and of course, the first Drupal tattoo -- both strong proof that Drupal is here to stay (or, at least, that tattoo is ;-)).
My personal low for Drupal in 2009 is that we didn't get the Drupal.org redesign implemented -- fortunately, we have that back on the fast lane.
2009 was also the year that Drupal started to get noticed by CIOs as illustrated by the fact that Gartner put Drupal in the visionaries quadrant and the number of Fortune 500 companies that started using Drupal. While Drupal grew in all dimensions, it probably saw the most relative growth within the enterprise. I think this is part of a bigger trend, because it feels like Open Source became almost generally accepted in 2009. Many more businesses realized that Open Source is a viable alternative, and as a result, I don't recall many Open Source "battles" in 2009 like those of the past. It is a little sad because I enjoyed fighting the good fight, and because it provided a healthy competitive edge. Reality is that, for the most part, we have won the Open Source battle. Open Source matters more every day and is changing the software industry -- already Microsoft is working on an Open Source blogging platform. These industry changes will also likely reflect, and even change, the Drupal ecosystem. In the years to come, expect competing software vendors to adopt our Open Source techniques and licenses, and expect large consulting organizations to have their own Drupal teams.
While we didn't see a major Drupal release in 2009, it was a great year nonetheless. We've used 2009 to position ourselves for continued success in 2010 and beyond. In 2010, I predict a number of stars will align: (i) the release of Drupal 7, (ii) the launch of the new Drupal.org redesign, (iii) at least a dozen of specialized Drupal distributions gaining momentum, (iv) test-driven development for contributed modules and (v) Acquia's Drupal Gardens and Buzzr (but only if they have a free tier) that will positively impact Drupal adoption. All of these initiatives are in different stages of development, but I believe there's a big chance that their combination will translate into breakout growth by the end of 2010. It also implies that 2010 will see some big changes, which is never easy.
Going forward, it is important we keep up with the larger market, which is evolving faster and faster with dozens of cool new services and APIs being launched almost every day. As a large Open Source community, we are better positioned to keep up than any proprietary vendor. We have many more people contributing to Drupal than proprietary vendors would ever be able to hire. However, proprietary vendors excel at focus and execution. There is nothing we can't do, but it is important that we're focused on the right things, and that we continue to be execution-driven. Let's remember our oldest mantra: "Talk is silver, code is gold".
As people start to build more products on top of Drupal, it is important that Drupal doesn't get in the way, and that it provides the flexibility and ease of customization that Drupal site builders demand. The winning platform will be the easiest platform to build on, not necessarily the platform that has the most flexibility. Over-generalization hurts both discoverability and adoption. Drupal's power vs. flexibility vs. ease of use is a tough balance to manage, but in general, our success in this balance has created Drupal's success. Our ability to maintain that balance is key, however, I hope and predict that for Drupal 8, we'll be very focused on improving the developer experience and lowering the barriers to participation (while maintaining Drupal's power and flexibility).
In general, I think content management systems have matured to a point where, for most people, they have relatively few differentiators at their core. That is why user experience is becoming perhaps the most important differentiator for non-niche users. The Drupal 7 usability project was a bold move but I hope we learned that bold moves aren't all that disruptive as they sometimes appear at the beginning. As Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister, put it: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.". I hope that, like 2009, we all continue to focus on user experience in 2010 because the single biggest barrier to the success of Drupal will continue to be ease of use as an end-user tool.
Mentally, it feels like we've surpassed Joomla! already, but it will take a number of years for that to trickle down and sink in, and even longer for the numbers to start reflecting that. I don't think we'll surpass Wordpress any time soon, but I do think Wordpress will continue to approach us from the bottom up. But, as Open Source goes mainstream, it won't matter all that much. In 2010, we'll start to compete against proprietary vendors, some of which will start to adopt Open Source strategies themselves. If they succeed, it could change the game because they'll bring focus and execution on top of the Open Source value proposition. Whatever happens, we'll benefit from the extra competition in 2010.
Thanks for 2009! It's been an honor to be a part of the Drupal project, and it remains so today. We have plenty of work to do in 2010 so let's all focus on making change happen.
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.
My Drupal predictions for 2008
My personal Drupal highlights for 2007 include the Drupal 5 release, bootstrapping the Drupal Association, the two Drupal conferences we organized, the Pro Drupal development book, and co-founding Acquia.
But more than anything else, I enjoyed being part of the Drupal community and helping it navigate through some of its growing pains. Thanks to you, 2007 was a blast.
In good tradition, here are my Drupal predictions for the next year.
Growth predictions for 2008
First, let's predict Drupal's growth in 2008. The short answer is that Drupal will continue to grow more, not less.
Much of Drupal's growth in 2008 will depend on the work we did in 2007. I'm extremely happy with the upcoming Drupal 6 release as it will be easier to use, it will run faster, and it will come with some great new features. Our work on Drupal 6 will pay off in 2008.
Many metrics can be used to predict Drupal's growth in 2008, so let's use a non-conventional one: to date, four books have been published on Drupal, but only one of these was published in 2007. In 2008, ten Drupal books will be published ...
What I care most about is not Drupal's growth, but that we will continue to democratize web publishing and web development in 2008. By growing Drupal and giving it away for free we accomplish two things: (i) we empower more individuals to publish online and (ii) we help grow a successful ecosystem that allows more people to make a living with web development. So not only will Drupal continue to grow in 2008, it will continue to make a positive change.
The more you give away, the more you get back, and because of this, working on Drupal will continue to be a labor of love in 2008.
Market predictions for 2008
We are still in a young market: there are hundreds of Open Source CMSes, there is no real competition amongst them ("We're all colleagues and friends!"), not to mention we all benefit from what seems unwieldy growth. (Note that I'm talking about the Open Source CMS market, not the proprietary CMS market.)
However, near the end of 2008, we'll see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. The Open Source CMS space will become less fragmented; the "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) will continue to grow but the growth of many other systems (i.e. Plone, Typo3, Xoops, e107, ezPublish, dotNetNuke, etc) will slow down significantly.
The good news is that the Open Source CMS market becomes easier to shop in. The bad news is that there will be a competitive edge.
Unless we manage to put more effort into (i) marketing, (ii) support, (iii) documentation and (iv) drupal.org this might turn out to be a tough battle for Drupal. Drupal.org will be our biggest challenge in 2008, and much of that will determine whether we'll be one of the "big three" Open Source CMSes at the end of 2008.
End-user predictions for 2008
From an end-user's point of view, 2008 will be characterized by the fact that we'll continue to give our users what they want. There will be a big and concentrated effort to further improve Drupal's ease of use. As a result, Drupal 7 will ship with one or two install profiles, many UI improvements, more AJAX, a basic WYSIWYG editor (or better WYSIWYG support), some wizards, and improved image and file handling. Yes, that is a lot.
Developer predictions for 2008
While we listen to our users in 2008, most of the excitement will be developer-centric.
A significant portion (but not all) of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) will move to core and we'll pave the path for Views by extending Drupal 6's query builder. There are three important motivations for this: (i) the desire to write less and less code to improve developer productivity, (ii) the desire to reduce the risk of these modules falling behind in terms of support and updates and (iii) drupal.org becoming dependent on them.
Integration of the CCK and Views will trigger a strong focus on improving our internal data models and APIs. While unheard in Drupal circles right now, object-relational mapping (ORM) will be the buzzword du jour by the summer of 2008. This, in turn, will lead to better web service integration, RIA integration (specifically Flex), and improved import/export functionality in Drupal 7.
The desire to reduce risks, combined with drastic API changes and a growing code base, will lead us to adopt a test driven development methodology. Drupal 7 will ship with some first regression tests.
All in all, the net result is that Drupal 7 will be an even better web application development platform. Comments and users as nodes continues to be a pipe dream though.
My final prediction is that I will get all of this year's predictions right, but that you still want to get a second opinion.
Linux on the desktop
One day in the distinct future, the adoption of Linux on the desktop will not be driven by improvements in desktop applications, but by desktop applications moving to the web. The more conventional desktop applications we can eliminate, the faster end-users will be able to adopt Linux.
It is both logical and inevitable that web applications, and not desktop applications, will take Linux to the desktop.
Microsoft has to invest in rich internet applications and web application development so they can compete with Google and Adobe. But do they realize that by making rich internet applications a commodity, they will indirectly help drive Linux' adoption for the reason outlined above?
Make the desktop obsolete and the Linux kernel will shine.
This week's official introduction of Microsoft Silverlight will be remembered as a tipping point in the history of Free and Open Source software, and Linux in particular.
My Drupal predictions for 2007
Last night, I started writing down my predictions for 2007, but I have so many predictions it is no longer funny. It turned out to be impossible to capture them in a single coherent blog post, so I'll continue to share my predictions throughout the new year as I've been doing for a while now.
That said, here is one Drupal prediction to start the new year with:
There are many million websites out there. But by the end of 2007, if you take 1,000 random websites, at least 3 of them will run Drupal. Spam sites and pornographic websites must be excluded from any such experiment.
Evaluating my Drupal predictions for 2006
It is almost 2007 now so let's look back at how I did last year:
- I predicted that by the end of 2006, there was going to be more content, the need for aggregation and filtering, and ultimately, consolidation of functionality.
SharePoint 2007 introduces blogs, wikis and RSS. FatWire announced that FatWire 7, to be expected in early 2007, will add blogs, tagging, polls, surveys, etc. Oracle's Stellent announced that they are adding blogs and wikis but also RSS.
- In terms of Drupal, I predicted that we'll see forum improvements, image and/or document improvements, some basic install profiles, more AJAX, incremental theme system improvements, significant node system changes, and various improvements to the administration pages.
Except for the forum improvements and the image and/or document improvements, I was right. We're introducing install profiles in Drupal 5, we became jQuery addicts (jQuery is a Javascript library), we added a new core theme, we started integrating custom content types, and we reworked the Drupal administration pages.
- I predicted: The exciting trend in 2006 will be the many new media services on the web; people want to publish more content. Most of this will be social media published by individuals or online communities. Not just more content and pictures, but also a lot more video.
With websites like Digg, MySpace and YouTube, user-generated content was certainly a buzzword in 2006. If anything, 2006 was the year of YouTube, which was purchased by Google for 1.65 billion USD in stock. Social video websites weren't popular yet at the end of 2005 when I predicted them, but it turned out that flash transcoding would become a big deal in 2006.
- I also predicted that traditional systems like Mambo, Joomla! and even Wordpress would grow faster than Drupal. They did.
- Despite the slightly worrisome tone of this message, 2006 promises to be an exciting year. Drupal will make more inroads on companies, governments, public institutions like school and universities, open source projects, and -- most of all -- non-professionals. Just like in 2005, we'll make substantial progress.
No need to argue about this: three Drupal books have been published in 2006, IBM started writing about Drupal, Google invested 70,000 USD, the size of our community grew by more than 230%, MTV started using Drupal, we organized two international Drupal conferences, etc. Thanks to the enthusiasm, the passion and the determination of the Drupal communiy, 2006 has been a pretty crazy ride.
When things come true, it is easy to say 'nothing great, nothing excited', but surely, these were predictions at that time. Call me arrogant, but I think I did a good job predicting 2006. Time to start working on my predictions for 2007 ...
SharePoint 2007
Bert Boerland predicts: Within 3 years the acronym "CMS" won't mean "Content Management System" anymore but will be redefined to "Community Management System".
Markets are more likely to fragment than to consolidate so I think both will co-exist and inevitably overlap. That said, I agree with the notion that community software will continue to emerge and that content isn't king. And to contribute to the disorderly jumble that is the CMS acronym, may I suggest a third term: Collaboration Management System. It might be a better match.
Especially the introduction of SharePoint 2007 might have significant impact on this particular market. SharePoint 2007 adds features like forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news aggregation, surveys, issue tracking ... but also install profiles and custom content types. Clearly, Microsoft decided to play catch up. And rumor has it that the improved integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook is jaw-dropping.
Then what is the leading open source alternative for SharePoint 2007? Because of its strong document management functionality, Alfresco comes closest, I think. (It makes them an interesting acquisition target. By RedHat? It could complement JBoss.)
Drupal's document management functionality and integration with tools like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is severely lacking. As it stands, Drupal is not a good SharePoint alternative, yet there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of functionality. It sure makes for an interesting situation.
I wonder what impact the introduction of SharePoint 2007 will have. What was once an important Drupal differentiator (i.e. bundling a wide variety of functionality into a single platform) will finally become commodity in 2007. Instead, seamless integration with other applications might become essential to compete? Interesting times!
