“As Jagielski explained it, the Zend people did not just sit in
a room and conjure up their best guesses about what the market
needed or wanted, or which itch they wanted to scratch, to use one
of the less appealing cliches from open source. Instead they took
the radical step of going out and talking to companies that might
be customers for PHP-based products and asked them not just what
they liked about PHP or wanted in a new release, but what was
keeping them from using PHP. I can tell you from experience that
the distinction between these two questions is far more than
semantic hair splitting. Understanding exactly why an individual or
company isn’t using a product, whether it’s software, underwear, or
Tupperware, is easily the best possible start to knocking down
those barriers to entry and turning that interested tire-kicker
into a happy, paying customer. As addiction counselors like to say,
acknowledging you have a problem is the first step in overcoming
it.”
“When Zend asked this question, they found that potential
customer concerns focused on three areas: performance, security,
and support. And that’s what they, in turn, addressed with their
products: Improving the performance of a PHP server by caching the
compiled PHP scripts (Zend Cache), a way to allow companies to
distribute binary-only versions of PHP scripts (Zend Encoder
Unlimited), and more comprehensive support and pre-packaged PHP
options (Zend SOS).”
“OK, you can argue that there’s nothing remarkable here, and
it’s just another case of a company that’s smart enough to do good
market research and use it properly before it committing to a
product line. Not all companies are that adept at such things,
obviously (New Coke, anyone?), but it’s not exactly earth
shattering, either. And I won’t even speculate about how many open
source developers actually talk to their intended users before they
develop a product. Still, given all the companies I speak with that
do think they’ve figured out the perfect product plan without
talking to anyone outside their company, it was refreshing to hear
what Zend did.”