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From: David_Marston@lotus.com
Subject: Market Research (Was: Shane's comments on Arved's comment)
To: general@xml.apache.org
Message-ID: <OF5EFDBB2B.FF46ECF2-ON85256A03.00533FBD@lotus.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 10:24:08 -0500
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Shane Curcuru asks:
>But how do we drive new users to join the community
>in the first place? And do we care how/why/when/what kind of new users
>join? It feels like most of our users (at least in xalan-dev, where I
>have the most experience) are reasonably technical types who are working
>on their own small to medium size projects.  How many medium to large
>corporate IT managers actively come to xml.apache.org projects to
>evaluate them for large-scale deployment across their enterprise, and
>how easy is it for them to implement these projects in their
>organizations?

I think the starting point is to leverage the widespread acceptance of
the Apache server. I think the big-corp IT people are hearing about XML,
and they already know about the Apache Web server, so now we want them
to look favorably on Apache XML. And some IT staffers want to start
submitting patches, so much the better.

Perhaps the larger companies are still at the exploratory stage with
XML, deciding about markup vocabularies or whatever. We may get their
endorsements in due time. Is there anyone on this list who would works
in big-corp IT who would care to comment?
.................David Marston