I was at an alumni (Columbia U.) sposored event at the Google campus speaking with the local alumni club president who works for Yahoo. At some point in the discussion I mentioned to him that Google has done a spectacular job of reaching out to developers in both the traditional sense - tools and support - and in the marketing sense. What I meant was that Google makes is sexy and cool to be developing on the Google platform.
Where as connecting up with many other platforms is just work, somehow Google makes you feel like you are part of the in crowd. And this matters. Yahoo for example has some some technically excellent components and APIs for application developers to use, but developers in the many tens of thousands are being wooed to the camp every day.
So what is Google is doing? Here's a few things I've noticed:
1. they will sponsor anything that looks like it's interesting to developers
2. seminars and learning opportunities on their campus and sponsored conferences
3. unbelievably good support in their user forums for developer API's
4. really good APIs that are relevant and constantly improving
It's not that the others don't do these things, they just don't do them as well.
And based on converstaions I've had with a couple of Google's competitors, they know this.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
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