Via a weekly email from Elance, I got a link to the following report: <http://www.elance.com/php/landing/main/ElanceSkillIndex.php>. (It pre-selected "Web & Programming" for me, but your mileage may vary.)

Elance is a marketplace for independent contractors and consulting agencies...not really like Clear Ink so much as the agencies down the line who will churn out production work. I find this data fascinating because it suggests how big the market is for a particular service and how many people there are serving it.  The numbers shown on this page are how many service providers there are. Clicking on the most of them will tell you how many open jobs there are. It looks like clicking on low demand skillsets return search results for providers.

For instance, for PHP I see 11,463 service providers and 1,906 open jobs. Logically, as a service provider, you'd want to be in an area with lots of open jobs and relatively low number of providers. As a buyer of services, you probably want to open jobs where there are the most number of service providers.

Of course there are complex issues to consider. Some of the technologies presented are subset of others. If you do ASP.NET, you probably also can do ASP. If you do Javascript, you certainly do DHTML and Ajax--even XHTML for that matter. Also, there is no distinction here between PHP 4 and PHP 5, but shops not experienced with PHP 5's object oriented features are probably comparable to shops who only do the old style of ASP. The most significant takeaway is that this report is not a recommendation to choose PHP because it's at the top of the list. Let's set aside the non-optimal breakout of the skills and look at the consumer to producer ratios.

I believe the numbers for Com are wrong. When I picked a developer on the list of "Com Experts", the skill wasn't listed. Since most of use have .com in our domains, I suspect Elance's search engine is making a mistake. Therefore, it looks like there's good opportunities for SEO, HTML, Flash, MySQL, Joomla and PHP. I'm somewhat surprised to see Joomla up there. My myopic view has been that Drupal is the darling of the CMS crowd.

If I put on my client hat, I might be encouraged to go with Drupal because there are 956 developers fighting over a measly 32 projects.

I also see that "Social Networking" is right in the middle of the list. That's great news for Clear Ink, or any agency looking to sell more of these types of leading edge services. As an agency aimed at leading clients with innovative techniques, you want to spend your time keeping yourselves at an expert level on the new trends and leave the commodity services (e.g. HTML) to partners.

While searching for some info on the web, HighBeam Research-hosted results were coming up with a fair degree of frequency. However, I couldn't access through to the articles they indexed because I had not subscribed to their service.

Fair enough. As was my question: How much does it cost to subscribe?

Exercise for the reader: go to the HighBeam Research web site and come back and tell me how much their service costs.

There is a link to "Take a FREE trial!". There are pages such as "What are the different membership options?" and "I have a billing question". There is a "Become a Member" page that links to their Terms and Conditions.

The Terms & Conditions page does inform you that this is an auto-renewing contract, that you will be bound by the payment terms, based on current rates specified in the enrollment screens, etc., that the price you pay is the price stipulated at the time you enroll. But without signing up for a free trial that automatically kicks over into a paid subscription, I don't see anywhere that tells you what the fee is.

I called HighBeam by phone, and when I asked the representative to point me to the URL with their pricing, he said he'd have to check. Two minutes later, he came back with the pricing information. When I again asked for the URL with their pricing, he came back two minutes later to tell me they don't have that on their web site, because "it depends."

This seems wrong to me, and I'm surprised that someone like Christopher Locke, co-author of the cluetrain manifesto, is associated with HighBeam. Isn't cluetrain all about communicating "in language that is natural, open, honest, direct..."?

 [Update 9/17/08 - Comments include a response from Highbeam as well as others.  This blog post is the top google result for "highbeam pricing" - wouldn't you think that should be highbeam.com instead? Looking again at their site, not only do they not give you the pricing, they don't even tell you their pricing model unless you start giving them info. Incredible!]

We all know the common marketing technique of the branded, mostly worthless gifts we get from all sorts of vendors. Hey, look! Here's a coffee mug that costs ten cents to make, but this one has my logo on it! Do you love me yet? If I already love the brand, I'll probably like the tchotchke. For example, there's that awesome Linux Journal shirt I got at the 2004 Linux World featuring political choices of donkey, elephant and penquin. Come to think of that, I had to extend my subscription to get that shirt. Splunk's shirts are good too, and free (as in beer). Otherwise, we know this stuff is just junk. I like that old NaviSite notebook I got for listening to a sales pitch, and maybe it kept their brand in mind, but I didn't make the mistake of thinking of it as anything terribly valuable.

So, you might imagine what a turn-off it was to come across Open-source software: It's the free coffee cup of today over at CNET. Hey, SUN's a client of Clear Ink's. I have friends who work there. I think some of the stuff they are doing, such as Darkstar, is really great. And I really thought the MySQL acquisition was a great deal. But I cringed to read that CFO Mike Lehman compared MySQL to a free coffee mug. Yikes!

MySQL is a database I've lived with for about 11 years now. Along with PHP, it revolutionized programming for me. I wrote a book about it several years ago. I do not appreciate the notion that MySQL is just a cheap giveaway. The strategy to support open source software in order to sell hardware makes sense. Slipping up with a message like this does not demonstrate great marketing sense. I'm often told "you're not the target audience" when I express negative feelings about advertising, but in this case I a good representative of their demographic. Talking about a great product like MySQL in that way will not encourage IT managers to switch to MySQL.

I don't know if it's buzz around the SUN/MySQL deal, but I stumbled upon Ingres again recently. Computer Associates spun off the Ingres business a couple years ago with an investment from Garnett & Helfrich Capital. They did $50m in revenue last year. MySQL only did $20m, so it's worth keeping an eye on Ingres. Of course, MySQL has many more users, probably because MySQL is much easier to get on whatever platform you're on. I'd expect MySQL to be available any given Web host. I wouldn't be surprised to find PostgreSQL being offered, but I'd be puzzled to see Ingres offered. That is, until I read up on them recently.

Ingres has a familiar business model: give away the source code and charge for support. Of course, there's the "community" edition and the "Commercial" edition of the product. That's the same thing we see from Zimbra, SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree. Ultimately there's some sort of connector to Windows included in the commercial version, but that doesn't appear to be the case with Ingres. They call out on their datasheet that there's nothing different between the free version and the supported version. You just get support.

I appreciate that. It kind of bugs me to know there's some extra feature I might find useful if only I shelled out $5K. The Ingres folks seem to be oriented on open source first and secondly figuring out how to make the money work. And like I said, the money part is certainly working for them. They even plan to IPO later this year.

Ingres is using the tried-and-true marketing technique of coining a new term that really doesn't have much extra meaning, but it does help us all get the message across in the elevator. Their term is "Business Open Source". It's meant to be open source software that's compatible with enterprise business. They spell this out in a white paper called Ingres Business Open Source — Rising to the open source challenge. It starts from ground zero, which is good. Anyone who already knows what open source is, doesn't need to be convinced it's better than closed source software.

I like that they cover in two pages the biggest advantages of open source. These are terms that any IT manager can understand and they are free of the kind of posturing you might read on Slashdot. The theme here is that open source projects faced the dual challenges of not having a company standing behind them and they didn't have a long track record. It's a bit of hyperbole, and it's certainly not true that Ingres Corporation revolutionized anything by introducing the term Business Open Source. These guys spun off of CA in 2005.

This kind of bragging and fudging of the facts turns me off, but it can't trump the usefulness of the product. Form ought to function. I can't deny that this kind of text is the comfort an IT manager at a more conservative firm likes to have. The real appeal is the plain facts: lower cost of acquisition, transparency, shared risk, proven technology, available support and only the features you need.

It may seem odd to say, but the holiday greetings that I received from sundry and assorted vendors, business partners and acquaintances left me feeling less than cheery, festive, happy or blessed in 2007. It actually bothered me enough that I felt the need to write about it. A couple of my top peeves:

Lack of Personalization – these were the holiday cards that were stuffed into preprinted envelopes, no signature, no note, and the return address did not contain an individual's name. I received a fair number of these from companies whose connection to me, or my business was hazy at very best. These cards left me feeling that some poor salesperson somewhere had been given a Holiday Card Mailing Quota (does that even exist?) and was forced to dig into the bottom of their desk drawer for business cards from trade shows long ago.

Blatant Self Promotion – These bothered me the most, as I am a true blue, dyed in the wool holiday celebrating fanatic. That said, I think that holiday greetings should be just that about the holidays. A marked example came in the form of an eGreeting from company X who provides CRM solutions (I think anyway, I am not sure what my connection is to them) – when I clicked to get my “personalized” snow globe, I was greeted with nothing more than an extended Flash ad for the company – and it didn’t even run properly in Firefox. I will grant that it had snow and my name was in the ad.

Why Should I Care? – I classified into this category those holiday greetings I received that were nothing more than a company’s recital of how successful they were that year – I am so happy for them, but unless I, or my business, was instrumental to that success I don’t think it is really an appropriate holiday greeting.

All said, I did receive some great, personalized greetings from people I knew well, or had just met. One of my favorites was from a company called Acquisio, it was an eGreeting that came with a personalized note. The card itself (which ran in all browsers) was lighthearted and actually allowed me to put faces to the names of people I had never met.

In all, I categorize my holiday card disappointment as one where too many marketers were speaking to themselves as opposed to me – this has fueled one of my New Years resolutions for 2008 – to make sure that my, and my clients’ work speaks clearly, contextually and concisely to the intended audience, and not to our marketing egos…wish me luck:-)