[Typo3] Blank Space help

Christopher bedlamhotel at gmail.com
Sun Oct 23 02:12:50 CEST 2005


On 22/10/05, Alex Heizer <alex at tekdevelopment.com> wrote:

> The fact is TYPO3 has
> lost a lot of customers because of the *perception* of rudeness, and it
> needs to be addressed if TYPO3 is to gain more acceptance in the US.
>

Great, more _completely_ qualitative impressions claiming to be THE
problem of all Typo3's North American marketing woes. This is as bad
as last weekend's thread. Questions for you:

1. How many 'customers' has Typo3 lost to this problem?
2. Why is Typo3 successful in Germany and other parts of Europe? Are
Germans/Europeans more tolerant of rudeness?
3. How do you _know_ there's a problem getting Typo3 adopted in North
America? (No problems getting clients to agree to use Typo3 here...)

I grant you that this list is a little prickly, but if you can't
answer these questions _quantitatively_, then I repeat here what I
said in last week's 'sky is falling' thread: this is empty and
pointless speculation. Marketers -- professional marketers at least --
do _research_ to answer these kinds of questions, they don't sit
around pontificating on mailing lists.

With respect to my third question, I think a _lot_ of the supposed
problem comes from the fact that Typo3 is a different KIND of tool
than its so-called competitors (such as Drupal, the *Nukes, and Mambo
or whatever it's called now). A tool like Drupal, for example, can be
up and running in minutes, along with a reasonably complete website,
but you only have to spend 10 minutes theming it before you realize
it's just _not_ as capable a tool as Typo3 in many ways.

My perspective on Typo3 (having built now some dozen or sixteen sites
of various sizes with it) is that it is a superb tool for the
following groups of users:

a) development firms or individuals in the business of building
websites for others,
b) organizations who operate a site created by a development firm,
c) people who make the bulk of their income via their website(s),
d) tech-hobbyists who can take the time to learn a very sophisticated,
but not necessarily simple-to-learn system.

As you can see, for users included in categories a, c and d, it could
be worthwhile or rewarding to take up Typo3 even if it's hard work,
and users in category b can be confident that their developer(s) will
be able to extend Typo3 to do what they need even if their needs
change very drasticallly over time.

But you'll notice these groups of users don't include the (entirely
legitimate) category of user who needs a powerful online document
creation/management tool but has no need of a sophisticated templating
engine (TV), has little need for a powerful templating language (TS),
little need for an application development framework, and has no real
knowledge of html/css/mysql/php/etc.

Many (I'm tempted to say 'most', but I suspect I'd be buried under
exceptions...) of the freely available CMS tools out there are MUCH
simpler to learn, and are much better suited to this group. To compare
Typo3 to such tools -- as most of these various community-critical
threads usually do eventually -- is ludicrous, and if the _target_
user of Typo3 is a development agency or serious online business
person as it has always seemed to be to me, then the market is
automatically FAR smaller than for the other tools I've mentioned.

Furthermore, the North American market must be at least as big as the
European market...there could be tens of thousands of new Typo3 driven
sites out there without it seeming like anything much had changed...

Lastly, a BIG part of the supposed 'US adoption problem' must also be
simply that it takes time to develop capacity to use a tool like
Typo3. I've been working on Typo3 for almost three years (for the
first year in my spare time...), and it's only in the last year that I
feel I've been using anything like Typo3's full potential. Europe has
a big head start on us ;-)


-Christopher



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