My brother, Ken, has often said, “If you focus narrowly enough and spend a few months researching intensely, you can become the world’s leading expert on a topic.”  The key here is focusing narrowly enough.  As you can tell, if you clicked on the link, Ken became, if not the, at least a leading expert on affiliate marketing. 

Because Ken focused on affiliate marketing, he created something else which is valuable for many of you who are trying to launch a new venture.   He created a community.  And from that, he also created a virtuous sales and marketing cycle.  Ken started with a service, which he developed, sold and delivered by himself. Later, he built training materials and supported the authoring of several books, which, indirectly helped promote the service.  He’s now developed a conference business that helps promote the training materials, which helps promote the service.  More than that, however,  he has built up a community of similar companies and actively promotes and speaks at the conferences of his competitors.  And I’m reasonably sure that he retains at least a small sliver of the revenue that passes through his affiliate program to a competitor.

I had dinner this past weekend with Eric,  an IT executive, who is also the author of  about a half dozen books.   His most recent book, Manager Mechanics, which is a book written for the first-time manager, forms the foundation of another virtuous sales and marketing cycle.  If he was so inclined, he could create speaking opportunities for himself, television and radio appearances, perhaps his own conference, and, yes, he could promote his competitors, which is exactly what he has done with his site, www.launchhr.com, which provides an online resource and community for managers.   All of these activities feed on themselves to help promote his book.  But he also is able, through affiliate programs, to pick up revenue when someone chooses a book  written by a different author. 

This all brings me to Sun’s storage announcement today.  Sun is trying to create the same sort of virtuous marketing and sales cycle, as my brother Ken and my friend Eric have created within their spheres of expertise.  CEO, Jonathan, is focused on the building of communities.  I think Sun’s expansion of their open source movement into storage is the right one for Sun.  As Jonathan reminded me recently, “You have a bit of an advantage, if the operating system is free and you can modify it.”  What I’ll be looking for next are the open-source Solaris storage developers conferences, the book deals, and the affiliate marketing programs. Oh yes, and the open-source version of Microsoft.  Well, maybe not.  It seems they know a bit about building communities, even without open source.