On 26 January 2010 I gave a presentation to Software GR.  The talk was an overview of several trends that we have seen in the version control tools market over the last 40 years.  I often like to follow a talk like this by publishing the same content here on my blog in the form of a complete article.  This time I think I'll just eliminate a lot of the tldr problem and summarize the highlights:

• The two big trends in version control today are Integration and Decentralization.
• Integration is driven by ALM.  It is the desire to have all tools used by a development team fully integrated together.
• Decentralization is driven by the recent wave of DVCS tools like Git and Mercurial.  They offer compelling benefits such as performance, a different kind of scalability, and more flexible workflows.
• The ALM trend is happening in the enterprise market.  Enterprises want everything integrated with everything else, and they want everything to support their ability to enforce process.
• The DVCS trend is happening in the open source community.  Born of the legendary cat fight between BitKeeper and the Linux kernel developers, Git and Mercurial are maturing and gathering momentum at a remarkable rate.
• These two trends are going to clash in a big way.  SourceGear's graphic designer drew me a nice diagram to depict this.
  
• The two trends cannot stay separate.  Each one has advantages which are too important for the other community to ignore.
• But the two trends and their respective communities are a bit like oil and water.
• Enterprises want tools that constrain.  The open source community wants tools that empower.
• The benefits of a DVCS would be diluted by integrating it with a bunch of other tools that are highly centralized.
• Enterprises need a least a little centralization for things like user administration.  In their eyes, complete decentralization without accountability and auditing features is a bug.
• Even as enterprise attitudes about open source are changing, that change is happening slowly, and the GPL (used by both Git and Mercurial) is still considered the scariest license.
• So Git and Mercurial are not even close to being enterprise-ready.  Similarly, none of the leading enterprise ALM tools are even close to being a DVCS.
• I believe that the main enterprise ALM providers (IBM/Rational, Microsoft, Serena and Borland) will all attempt to add DVCS features to their products.  At least two of these companies (IBM/Rational, in a talk by Jean-Michel Lemieux at the Rational Conference in 2009, and Microsoft) have already made public remarks about a desire to move in that direction.
• And I predict that they will all fail.  It is impossible to turn any of these systems into a true DVCS without a nearly complete rewrite.  The D in DVCS is not a feature which can be added.
• But all of them will do it anyway, by making compromises.  They will try to add "just enough" Decentralization.  Some of their customers will find the results to be sufficient.
• Meanwhile, the true DVCS tools will continue to move forward, but their progress toward credible ALM will be slow.  Enterprise-level integration is grunge work, not the kind of coding that hackers do as a labor of love.  Nobody does this stuff without getting paid.
• So these two trends will continue to be distinct for a while, but the pressure and tension between them will remain, and the areas of overlap are going to continue getting messier.

"Do I really look like a guy with a plan?
You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars.
I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it.
You know, I just ... do ... things.
-- The Joker

On the product side of marketing, planning has served me well.

But on the marcomm side, you know, I just ... do ... things.

And since the whole point of marcomm is to draw attention, I try to do things which are at least a little outrageous:

We did those things because nobody had done them before.  I'll try just about anything.  I just want to see what works.  And afterward, I usually report here on my blog about how these things go.

In the second half of 2009, we did a marketing campaign for Vault.

This is your brain on SourceSafe

As I mentioned above, Vault was originally positioned to be a compelling replacement for SourceSafe.  Since our 5.0 release contains a new Handoff feature which makes it easier than ever to make the transition, we decided to focus this campaign on the product's original positioning, as a SourceSafe replacement.

The creative on this campaign was ... edgy.  In a nutshell, we compared SourceSafe to an addiction.  The ads were loosely patterned after billboards and ads aimed at convincing people not to use illegal drugs.  The basic idea was to portray SourceSafe as something which might send your life into a downward spiral toward a 12-Step program or rehab.

We knew from the beginning that some people were going to be ticked off.  We just weren't sure how many people and who.

We tried testing the ads by taking them home to our spouses for feedback.  This resulted in a few tweaks, but we didn't get any criticism that caused us to change course.  One guy's wife suggested that the ads would be a better reflection of our industry if the models in the stock photos were less attractive.  :-)

So we moved ahead.  The first thing we did was run the ads in MSDN magazine, which is published by an outside firm in close coordination with Microsoft.  Nobody complained, so we kept going.  We ran banner ads on several Microsoft-centric websites.

And then we showed up in November at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference with this campaign as the theme for the entire booth.  We gave away hundreds of T-shirts saying "VSS Must Die".

You can see the whole thing at vssisdead.com

This campaign was darker and more negative than anything we've done before.  We knew we were pushing the envelope.

Did we go too far?

Well, we certainly didn't expect to win any Most Admired Company awards by running a marketing campaign which portrays the users of our competitor's product as drug addicts.  :-)  But the campaign was intended to be funny, in a "humor noir" sort of way.

Somewhere during the execution of this campaign, I realized that SourceSafe is very much like that dorky kid in high school that gets teased by everybody.

Why do high schoolers pick on other kids?  Because it works.  In high school, popularity is correlated with several factors, but one of them is unkindness.  The meaner you are (to the right people), the more popular you are.  Once the crowd has observed who is getting bullied by the popular kids, others join in.  Even if they don't know the kid, they start ripping on them, just to try and identify with the "in" crowd.

As grownups, most of us know that this is reprehensible.  No kid deserves to be treated this way just because they're different.

But teenagers do it anyway.  And they do it because it gets them what they want.

This particular kid is an easy target.  SourceSafe isn't just a little bit dorky.  We're talking pocket protector, greasy hair, and a sport coat with elbow patches.

When it comes to poking fun, if any company is fair game, it's Microsoft.  And if any Microsoft product is safe to pick on, it's gotta be SourceSafe.  SourceSafe is the bullying target that everyone can agree on.

Dissing SourceSafe is so common that folks do it whether they have used SourceSafe or not.  Just like in high school, people join the bashing just because they think it makes them look cool.

And SourceSafe has basically nobody defending it.  When emacs people get an attitude, the vi fans speak up.  When Visual Studio fans start trash talking, the Eclipse crowd starts showing features.  But nobody stands up for SourceSafe.  People bash it, and SourceSafe just mopes down the hall wearing flood pants and a shirt with the top button done.

So anyway, we chose to go negative on this, but we figured we were in plenty of company.

And while I'm rationalizing and making lame excuses for being a jerk, please note that SourceSafe is NOT REALLY A PERSON.

Results

In general, this campaign worked.  People at PDC loved the T-shirts.  The click-through rate on the banner ads was the highest we have ever seen.

Some people were offended, but we received far more positive feedback than negative.

However, just like the awkward kid at school, SourceSafe doesn't really deserve this.  I've admitted it before, and I'll do it again now:  SourceSafe isn't really that bad.

In its day, SourceSafe was awesome.  When it was created by One Tree in the early 90s, it was nearly revolutionary.  SourceSafe brought ease of use in version control to a whole new level.  Microsoft acquired this product because it was outstanding.

Over the years, SourceSafe hasn't always aged well.  Its architecture didn't fit with the Internet.  By relying on file sharing protocols for network access, SourceSafe ended up with data corruption problems that triggered a tidal wave of criticism.

But overall, SourceSafe has been a very successful piece of software.  Most of us would love to create something that has thousands of happy users 15 years later.

At trade shows, people come up to us and ask why they should switch from SourceSafe to Vault.  We always respond by asking them if they are happy with SourceSafe.  If they say yes, we tell them not to switch.  This conversation has happened at every show I have ever attended.  Lots of people use SourceSafe every day without problems.

And despite those negative ads, I believe SourceGear is doing more for SourceSafe users than any other company, including Microsoft.  We recently shipped SourceOffSite 5.0, a major upgrade with improved performance, new features, and a fancy new ribbon UI.

Eric, if this is an apology, it sucks.

It's not.  I don't owe SourceSafe an apology.  SourceSafe isn't a person.  It's just a bunch of code.

And it's hard to imagine the need to apologize to Microsoft as a company when so many of its employees stopped by the booth at PDC to join the bashing.  Some of them took shirts.

So I'm not really apologizing.  I'm just sharing about my experience and my reactions to it.

One exception:  SourceSafe's principal author was Brian Harry.  In working through the Microsoft acquisition of Teamprise I came to know Brian and developed a great deal of admiration for him.  He is incredibly smart, and his accomplishments are amazing, including SourceSafe, the CLR, and Team Foundation Server.  Brian, if our campaign caused you any personal offense, please accept my public apology.

So anyway, there you have it.  I went negative.  And it worked.

I'm not eager to do it again.

But I have no regrets.  You know, I just ... do ... things.

Credit and blame

I wrote most of this piece in the first person, but the truth is I deserve more blame than credit.  If you were offended or disappointed by this marketing campaign, blame me.  On the other hand, if you liked this marketing campaign, credit John Woolley and Paul Roub.  The creative work here was mostly theirs.

Short Version

Sorry folks, until further notice, my blog does not support comments.

Long Version

I've been using Haloscan for comments on this blog.

Haloscan is being turned off by the company that acquired it.

That company offered a transition to a new service, but that transition requires more effort than I am willing to invest (zero).

I downloaded all the old comments in some sort of XML file, but doing anything with that file would require effort.

Investigating other ways of providing comments for this blog would also require effort.

A day may come when the laziness of this blogger fails, when I forsake my procrastination and break all bonds of inertia, but it is not this day.

People keep asking me why I haven't blogged about the Microsoft acquisition of our Teamprise division.

Well, it's kind of complicated.

It all started three days before the signing of the deal when my laptop died.  And I mean it's really dead.  It won't boot, from any device.

Great timing, eh?

Fortunately, all I really needed for working on the deal was email and Microsoft Word, so I just switched over to my netbook.

I completely forgot about the MacBrick Pro until this weekend when I realized that the press coverage was going to hit Monday morning and the only installation of my blogging software was trapped in a lifeless piece of aluminum on my office floor.

So I ran out and bought a new Mac laptop, hoping to get everything going in time to write my blog entry for Monday.

And then I figured, heck, as long as I was doing a completely new setup, why not start off right with an Intel X-25M instead of the stock hard disk?

Getting everything configured wasn't too difficult, but the SSD ended up costing me a lot of time because Monday morning I had to tell the other coders on my project team that I can do a full build in 24 seconds.  All that gloating killed a couple of hours, and by the time I got back to my desk I figured I should check and see how the press coverage was going.

Whoa.  The Microsoft PR machine is amazing!  They got over 230 articles published about the acquisition.  I couldn't get that kind of press coverage without committing a felony.

Right about then I got into an argument with my daughter because I wanted her to walk four blocks from her school over to my office and she said it was too far.  I wish my Mom would call me more often to tell me how much she appreciates the fact that I was a model teenager who never caused my parents any trouble.

So anyway, with hundreds of people already writing about the deal, I needed a new angle.  I figured I had to come up with something cool or not post anything at all.  So I started drafting something, but I got stuck when I couldn't find anybody to confirm whether Kanye West jokes are still funny or not.  (Yo Eric!  I'm really happy for you and I'mma let you finish, but Groove was the greatest Microsoft acquisition of all time!)

A short time later our sales VP walked in to let me know that SourceGear's name was mentioned in the "New York Freaking Times".  Cool.

The next morning I resumed working on this blog entry, or rather, on the infrastructure to support same.  I restored the VMware image from my Time Machine disk, but I couldn't get the product serial number to work.  So I figured maybe it was one of those stupid Snow Leopard bugs that everybody is complaining about, and decided to upgrade to 10.6.2.  But that took hours, because apparently every Steve Jobs disciple on the planet was upgrading their Mac on the same day, so Apple's download servers were really slow.

While I was doing that, the aforementioned daughter asked me to drive her to the mall and I refused.  So she walked FIVE MILES to get there by herself.

Keep that in mind next time you're having trouble understanding the mind of a teenager:  FIVE MILES to the mall is a shorter walk than FOUR BLOCKS to your Dad's office.

Suddenly I realized it had been a whole day since I told any of my coworkers that I can build the whole tree in 24 SECONDS, and well, you know what happened to the rest of my morning.

So then I walked across the street to the coffee shop to pick up a copy of the local newspaper.  As usual, they did a very nice job on the press coverage for us.  And, as usual, our story was below the fold because the main story of the day was about farming.

Keep that in mind next time you're having trouble understanding the mind of Champaign:  If you want your big-time corporate acquisition to be the top story, make sure you work something about corn yields into the deal.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's 232 points for the Microsoft PR team and one point for me.  I'm sure there's some PR guy at Microsoft trying to take credit for Don Dodson's piece in the Tuesday morning edition of the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, but that one was MINE.  They may be able to place stories in the New York Freaking Times, but I've got connections too.

I'm not kidding -- building this project's code on some machines can take several minutes, but my new Mac can do a whole build in 24 seconds.  The X-25M is way cool.  I am now seriously considering putting a $700 SSD into my $300 netbook.

This morning I gave up and paid VMware for a new serial number, and here I am writing in my blog once again.

As I write this, the realization hits me.  I got frustrated because I couldn't move my VMware installation to my new machine.  My company just had a liquidity event.  I could have paid VMware $79 to solve the problem, but instead, I decided it would be better to thrash on that problem for three days and THEN pay the $79.  Yep, I'm in the big leagues now.

So anyway, if you haven't heard, Microsoft announced Monday morning that it has acquired our Teamprise division.  I think the deal ended up being a nice win for both Microsoft and SourceGear.

I'll be at PDC next week.  Stop by the SourceGear booth and say hi.