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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Expectation management

Ted Leung takes me to task for making him expect the list of Sun bloggers would be full of incisive Java commentary (or, indeed, full of commentary). I plead undocumented tongue-in-cheekness and apologise a little, although I'd point out that Sun actually comprises more than just Java people - who can fault Norm Walsh's blog for example? And there are plenty of MIAs on the Microsoft side as well I think.

More interesting, though, is his observation about where the richness lays in the Java community. Whereas Microsoft's community essentially has only Microsoft thought-leaders (after all, it's a closed-source dictatorship - no amount of pushing up-hill will fix that), the Java thought leaders are all over the wide community as you'd expect from the openness of the JCP (now in new, more transparent 2.6 flavour). This gets reflected in the blogs - some percentage of the thought-leaders maintain them in each case, and the distribution is in the same ratios. Ted concludes:

In the end, the two companies have to decide not only that they want to foster communities, but what kind of community they want.

I think they already have, and I think the distribution of blogs is an accurate reflection of that choice.

posted at 5:53 AM (UK) | |