JHill

I attended the Meet the Makers event last Wednesday. It’s an interesting idea, get the people behind the sites, technology, etc. that are exciting to the industry and have them interviewed by a knowledgeable guy and an audience.

The panel with Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman was pretty good, but the Hillman Curtis talk was worth almost missing my flight.

Joshua Davis and the guy from Zagat were okay, but there wasn’t much meat to either of their interviews.

Also got to see the sneak preview of Macromedia’s NDA-protected content management tool, Contribute. The NDA’s been lifted now that the product’s been announced.

Macromedia / Allaire make great products, but they occasionally market them in a way seemingly designed to piss off their customers. With Spectra, they sidestepped us to go directly to the clients that we spent our blood and sweat convincing that their platform was solid and pitch them products that they thought competed directly with our services. Rather than come to us, explain the product and maybe let us sell it to all our clients.

They seem to be pushing Contribute in a similar fashion. Rather than give us ways to integrate ColdFusion into webDAV, like Zope, they’ve given us tool that some at Macromedia are saying will maker our dynamic content management systems obsolete. If we had WebDAV support, then I’d sell Contribute to every client. I could tie it in to all of our projects, some of which have upwards of 500 authors. Now, I’ll only be able to sell it to our clients who need static sites, who usually have one author. While they may be removing hassle from a subset of web developers, our business is developing systems that remove the hassle from web management.