I’ve seen strategic leadership mentioned a few times. Strategic leadership requires strategies. Strategies are best when coherent. Coherence happens when strategies don’t involve serious conflict over the resources required for their execution.
The main strategic goal seems to be: make sure Haskell at least survives, and ideally, thrives. The main strategic theme, so far, seems to be this: make Haskell more approachable. As a newbie, one who is, as usual, having a lot of trouble gaining traction on the learning curve, I’m happy to see agreement there.
Recently, I asked whether there was a marketing strategy (besides making Haskell more approachable, which amounts to “build a little better, and maybe a few more will come.”) I didn’t really get a “yes” to that. I got directed to a marketing task group (though with no link.) That was disappointing.
Now I’m going to ask you to believe several incredible things:
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every nonprofit has to make a profit in some form (not very monetary in the case of NPOs); in that sense, it’s a business. The “profit” is in how it makes “customers” (users and contributors) feel, and in how satisfied the donors are about how the situation is improving.
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there is no such thing as “the profit motive”, except for passive investors. In any competitive market, profit is actually a cost. It’s a way to signal to stakeholders that your enterprise is robust enough to simply distribute some surplus resources. This builds confidence for those times when you run at a loss. For a “nonprofit”, it’s the good will built up among users of the services provided, the volunteers, the paid employees, and the donors. For an organization like the Haskell Foundation, “losses” might be in for form of losses of reputation, like another language suddenly gaining on it, or some corporate embarrassment attributed to Haskell but not really Haskell’s fault, or simply some witty critic writing a viral piece about how Haskell sucks.
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as a business, a nonprofit is like any business, in that it’s essentially about marketing. If you can pay for services, you can potentially outsource everything else (even if it’s often not optimal, but this would take me into various theories about the economics of the firm, not very relevant here.) Marketing is the core.
Insane? I got these insights from Peter Drucker (most especially his book about managing nonprofits.) So, go argue with him. (Well, he’s dead, but you know what I mean.) The one exception is “marketing IS the business.” That’s from Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization, where he said to fire the entire marketing department. Understanding the market strategically is for the CEO and the entire C-suite. If they don’t understand the market, the organization is going to die, sooner or later.
Making Haskell more newbie-friendly is, in effect, price-based marketing. That’s good as far as it goes, because, right now, Haskell costs newbies a lot. Sure, you can download everything for free. But as a newbie, the cost you pay is in your time, effort and stress.
Price-based marketing is a very simple and obvious strategy, but execution incurs costs: sophisticated, experienced developers who are deep into the community mindset need to be motivated by the concerns of newbies, to provide the needed cost reductions in the product. That’s not always easy. So you’ll probably need more.
Marketing as a strategic discipline is very much about identifying emerging opportunities.’ These may exist because the competition is slackening in some niche, thus becoming more vulnerable. Opportunities can also emerge because of demographic changes, regulatory changes, new technologies, or dramatic improvements in existing technologies. Sometimes, more nuanced analysis of existing markets reveals that a market is under-exploited – there’s a sub-category that’s still not well served.
Inevitably, these windows of opportunity close. Strategic direction in marketing is therefore a constant process of monitoring the competitive environment and evaluating odds. Which windows look likely to open soon, based on existing trends? Which are open but not being rushed yet? Which could close soon, and are they worth trying for, at this late date? Of the choices generated, which one or two (ideally one) should get primary focus?
In the note where I asked “where is your marketing strategy?” I pointed out that branching out further into academia, where numerics are important but not (at least for initial research initiatives) overwhelming in their computational demands, Haskell might find some openings. Haskell is somewhat stereotyped as an academic language, but a focus on science and technology outside computer science, but still in academia, means geographic proximity. That is seldom a bad thing where face-to-face outreach can be effective. Haskell does decently well on floating-point benchmarks, especially compared to Python, which has become huge in “data science” (whatever that is! didn’t they used to call it “statistics”?) Some sciences are rather algebraic, and that’s another conceptual entry point.
I didn’t bring up this hypothetical strategic theme out of self-interest. My current evaluation of Haskell is in lexical semantics, where my goal may not involve a single floating point computation for my intended user base. And if lexical semantics was significantly algebraic, Chomsky would have swept the field, instead of throwing in the towel. I only gave it as an example of how to think about strategy.
To sum up:
You’re in business, whether you think of it that way or not.
You need to make a profit, whether you think of it that way or not.
Job #1 is marketing, whether you hate it or not,
And marketing on price, like it or not, means you’re starting from way behind other languages. Haskell is hard to learn. The error messages I’m wrestling with daily are practically screaming at me, “DON’T BUY HASKELL, IT’S AWFUL.” I keep going only because of one piece of code, written long ago, that makes me think I see something that very few have seen, and none have fully exploited.
So, you’ll have to become more strategic marketers. I’m sure you have the intellectual depth for it. After all, Haskell beat one of the most strategic retreats ever: “Avoid success at all costs.” The meaning was: “Don’t get trapped in de facto standardization long before optimality is in sight.” The result looks like a great product, just with a confusing user manual and some almost-opaque failure modes. Still, “avoid success at all costs” was very smart for its time, because few things sell better than quality, and most of Haskell’s current quality issues are ultimately superficial and fixable. Now, it’s time for the 180-degree turn. And that means getting very strategic about marketing, in a completely different way.
