Re: What can we learn from MySQL?

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 21:31:33 -0400,
Andrew Payne <andy(at)payne(dot)org> wrote:
>
> At some point (probably there now), I think the lack of a "Postgres, Inc."
> is going to hinder adoption. Companies want to 'buy' from vendors that look
> like real, viable companies, and provide them products with support,
> training, features, and direction. With MySQL, you get one stop shopping.
> With Postgres, you've got to find and assemble the parts yourself. Most
> CIOs stop there, and start waiting for MySQL to get better before switching
> from Oracle.

I would expect that technical people (which would be DBAs and application
developers) should be doing this research and reporting the results to the CIO.

> The other issue is marketing: in mature software markets, the best
> marketing (not the best technology) often wins. Without a sizeable
> marketing budget earmarked for Postgres, MySQL could be 60% as good and
> still win, unfortunately.

It is not clear that Postgres needs to "win". It needs to have enough people
interested in it in order to continue to significant development. It doesn't
need to have a majority of the market share in order to do this. I suspect
that get a larger market share amoungst some categories of users will
hurt development by requiring more support than they contribute back to
the project.

> For those that look to Apache: Apache never had a well-established
> incumbent (Oracle), an a well-funded upstart competitor (MySQL). Rob
> McCool's NCSA httpd (and later, Apache) were good enough and developed
> rapidly enough that they prevented any other HTTP server projects from
> getting critical mass.

Perhaps for a while. There are open source web servers now. A derivative
of AOLserver is used by openACS.