Community Building Aims at Developers

The success of open source developers in creating a community willing to coordinate and support projects is driving Microsoft to expand its own community programs. The company is creating Web sites focused on specific products and technologies, encouraging employees to post content on personal and Microsoft-sponsored Web logs (“blogs”), and providing licensed access to larger portions of its source code. The initiative is also meant to soften customer impressions of Microsoft as a large, unresponsive company by showing the individuals behind many decisions. But if Microsoft is not careful, it risks diluting its message and making contributors resentful if it doesn’t act on their suggestions.

Communities Aid Platform Adoption

A strong community helps ensure that a platform has third-party products that run on it and provides support for customers who are evaluating, adopting, or deploying the platform. For example, much of the initial success and rapid adoption of Windows was due to the large library of application and utility software available for Windows. Microsoft’s Developer Relations Group (DRG) evangelists were able to build this community by evangelizing the benefits of Windows to developers, helping developers understand how to write Windows applications and utilities, and making free or inexpensive SDKs that aided in writing Windows software. By helping ISVs, Microsoft helped itself, because one popular new application could lead to sales of tens of thousands of copies of Windows, which in turn enticed more ISVs to build applications and join the Windows community.