I took something OT, so I’m diverting it to a different thread :).
I’m sorry that you missed it, but I had already elsewhere posted a comprehensive explanation and list of what I mean (and what is usually inferred) by “supporting” an industry or community. Because you had replied to that thread I thought you had probably read my post along with the others.
FYI, along with the post I pointed out that the GTG had been doing several of the things I’d listed.
For your convenience:
"But how do you support an industry? Well, this is well-trodden ground, researched over decades by economists etc. I’m no expert by any means, but I do have experience of building communities, and there are several parallels. The biggest things I can see are:
* Engender and maintain trust. The next few items fail without this...they only work when people *believe* you. Similarly, reliability and believability is critically important
* Commit to the industry, long term. If people can see major commitment from someone important, they will follow. Partly because it increases the chances that thigns will get fixed, and increases the amount of resource that is devoted to this industry.
* If you're the platform provider, promote your platform outside the industry (but for that industry in particular), so that people like venture capitalists, customers, and partners for industry members are already convinced of your platform's value, and are more likely to work with members of your industry. Usually only you have the influence and resource to do this effectively.
* Understand your industry. Work every day at improving your understanding, and your ability to speak *with* and *for* the industry, rather than just *at* them. This is critically important for you to make profit in the long run, and also at making all your other moves much much more efficient / effective
* Work closely with people within your industry, understanding their problems, and helping wherever you can. On the bottom line, Sun could throw $1000 of consulting at every company developing java games this year, and it wouldn't even appear on the significant figures of the annual financial summary. But for those companies, $1000 is a heck of alot of time and expertise, that makes them more efficient and much more likely to produce games that make your platform look really, really good.
* Spending a LOT of time communicating with your industry. You *cannot* do too much of this, especially when your industry is struggling to survive. You have got to build a community and drag it day by day through problem after problem, literally drag it into the successful flourishing booming industry you want it to become. This requires incredibly strong leadership and a lot of guts and determination - you will have to fight the industry's battles for it, because no-one else in your fledgling industry will be strong enough to. When Shawn says that leadership is not important, he pulls down the whole house of cards, and in his theoretical approach dooms Sun to failure - java games development will probably never be anything but a tiny niche if Sun can't show leadership in this area (it's just - only just - possible that someone else could take on this role, but it's much much harder. About one in a million chance, I reckon)
* Partner with everyone; partner with anyone! Build partnerships everywhere you can, get your finger on the pulse, and be a matchmaker between all in the industry. Be the ultimate networker, and - most importantly of all - disseminate *everything* you are aware of to all the members of the industry. This is the "shotgun approach" - scatter info everywhere and wait for some cool things to come together. It works; it's inefficient, but very very fast and effective at getting things done. When your industry is struggling, this is like a huge boost-up, although it takes some considerable effort."
Actually, yes we already do this to a large extent for all people who come to us with serious games proposals (i.e. discounting those who come to us with no games proposal at all, or who haven’t thought about what they are doing enough to know what they want!).
But despite being arguably more open than you have been (we disseminate more information without requiring NDAs), we have less reason to be - we do not have thousands of people already using our platform (I’m only referrring here to the games developers and potential games developers on the java platform), and we are not attempting to support the growth of java as a viable platform for games development.
If you’d care to ask me again in 10 years time, assuming we grew to have many hundreds of customers, then yes we would do exactly what you are saying you cannot do.
I have worked in the IT industry for a decade and my point is not incorrect. Nearly everyone reveals sensitive information, deliberately, as a tool to further their ends. What you appear to not understand is that there are two streams of “sensitive information”. To the company lawyers there may be no apparent difference, but to the marketing dept there’s a huge difference. There’s the sensitive information that screws over the company if leaked (e.g. algorithms, patentable techniques, etc); I wouldn’t dream of asking you for that. Then there’s the sensitive information that enables other people to understand where you’re going, how you’re going there, and how they can fit in with it - also whether they want to fit in with it. This saves you a great deal of time (fewer people come to you and waste your time with things you don’t want), provides you with more opportunities (more people come to you with things you’d never have noticed yourself, but they saw what you were doing and realised you might want/need them), and provides your competitors some insight into your strategy. But so long as the first two bring more benefits than the third burns, it’s worth doing.
By reference to my company, if we followed the Chris Melissinos strategy, we wouldn’t have a website and we wouldn’t tell anyone we existed (NB: a very small percentage of companies deliberatly choose to do exactly this). I wouldn’t have spoken at the MDC last year. I wouldn’t have written articles for Stratics and the like. We wouldn’t let people see our architecture diagrams. Because ALL of this gives huge strategic advantage to Butterfly, Zona, BigWorld, etc - but there’s a balance to be struck, and the value to us of having the exposure we do have outweighs what we lose by the fact that those competitors can see us competing with them, and can evaluate reasonably accurately the level of risk we pose to their own businesses.
That would be nice. But, presumably because no-one quite knew what the board was supposed to do, we have Shawn saying the following. Please note that I’m not implicitly criticising him by quoting this - just pointing out that he has said he doesn’t feel his position as a board member is about improving communication:
“Communication -
If anyone feels that Sun does [?not? - I think] communicate enough, is this a game related issue? You may be upset/disagreeing with a long standing cooperate culture but the fact is the gaming community is not going to change that much. In fact, the JSR construct is something of a manifest of that culture. Think about how deeply that runs. Sun works tightly with its partners, the JSR is public formalization of that. Nuff said.”
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The group at Sun is called the Game Technology Group right, not the Game Business Group…
I am definitely all about a platform of developing tech here, but if you have issues with Sun’s business management, yes, I am not the person that will represent you."