The other analyst

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The other analyst

Turns out, one of the "other analysts" that Michael Signer spoke of was a blogger named James Governor. In the comments to my previous post, James writes:

"actually it was me. i got a quick email from Michael and gave him a rapid response. its pretty harsh to accuse him of making the idea up if he attributed it to an analyst. Basically i felt that you are doing good work with Roller, and engaging with Sun customers, but that Sun itself has said basically not much about the future of the product at all. Michael had heard a sniff of an open source splash and is looking for ideas. i have not got the inside skinny, but i could easily imagine Sun "packaging" the Roller and open source news, or changing the license. or something. Either that or open sourcing some other JES componentry. Feel free to set the record straight. What are Sun's plans for Roller?"

James, I assumed that he was making things up because he was so far off base. How could he not know that Roller is already open source? Development is done on a public CVS server, issue tracking is public, and discussions happen on public mailing lists, blogs, and the Roller wiki.

James asks that I "set the record straight" and "what are Sun's plans for Roller?" I'm not going to discuss Sun's future product plans or announcements, but my personal plan is to make Roller the best possible platform for blogging, collaboration, and community building. If you want to know how that plan is going, watch me work.

Dave Johnson in Roller 02:41AM Jan 06, 2005 Comments [4]
Tags: Roller

Comments:

I am an industry analyst. the firm is RedMonk. we do a fair amount of work with the JES team and others at Sun. my last name is spelled "Governor". i am watching you work - that is one reason i subscribe to your blog. the "set the record straight" line was reflected from your entry. Until Sun says what its plans are the record may not be straightened. Roller is of course open source, but we still don't know what Sun's plans are exactly. Surely you would accept there is a difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice, for example? or between Eclipse and WebSphere Studio, even? Sun could easily be making a big announcement of a productized version of the Roller open source code next week couldn't it? the "full corporate treatment"? is that really such an outlandish idea? Marketers reannounce things--that is what they do. How could Michael not know Roller was open source? maybe he was on deadline and has a whole industry to watch. should he have delved a bit deeper - maybe; that's for his editor to say. but the story did say Roller was open source when Sun hired you, right? If folks at Sun are teasing reporters with tidbits of information then of course they will try and find out what the story is. that is what reporters do - call sources. Sometimes the sources are right on, sometimes they are wildly off the mark, sometimes they are under NDA and must remain silent. That might be why Michael anonymized me - perhaps i said "this is pure conjecture but..." i will say again i am quite excited about Sun's corporate blog story. there is a big opportunity for the vendor that nails the space, whether the software is open source or not.

Posted by James Governor on January 06, 2005 at 02:14 PM EST #

You're right James, Sun could be announcing just about anything and that is pretty exciting. Hell, I'm excited and I have no idea what Singer is talking about. I still think he could have done his homework a little better.

Posted by Dave Johnson on January 06, 2005 at 05:05 PM EST #

cool beans. i am looking forward to meeting you. are you coming to the analyst conference next month? if not maybe we can meet for a pint or something? we'll keep the AR team in the loop.

Posted by James Governor on January 07, 2005 at 09:05 AM EST #

[Trackback] Was thinking about if I ever became an industry analyst and could throw my integrity out the window, I could give the typical defense which would go something like "our enterprise clients are reluctant to commit mission-critical applications to untried...

Posted by Thinking Out Loud: Thought Leadership from an Enterprise Architect on February 18, 2005 at 12:35 AM EST #

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