Most platform teams forget they have a product to sell to developers. Part one of my new series over at The New Stack lays out why internal platform marketing is incredibly important. Here’s excerpt on positioning:

Platform Positioning: What Is It Good For?

Positioning defines where your platform fits in your organization’s technical landscape. It answers the crucial question: “When and why should developers choose this platform over other options?”

Oftentimes, platforms are positioned as the everything solution that solves all the problems and, thus, should be used for all applications. This might be technically right, but narrowing down to a set of smaller, specific positions is helpful at first.

Here are some examples of how to position your platform:

• Your platform is good for cloud native applications, not just any type of application.

• Your platform is a good destination for modernized applications. Many modernized applications target cloud native architectures, moving apps to containers and microservices architectures.

• Your platform is the best place to run Java applications, especially ones that use the Spring Framework.

• Your platform is a great place to develop and run AI-enabled applications.

• You could say that your platform is good for classic three-tiered web applications: something with a UI, a middleware and business logic layer, and then a database.

Another position could be that your platform is good for highly regulated apps that need to run in air-gapped environments.

You don’t need to pick just one positioning for your platform. After all, platforms are usually general and intended to be used for many different types of applications. However, coming up with multiple positions like the above allows you to speak to specific teams, making it easier for them to sort through all the options and figure out whether your platform is the right fit for them.

Do read the whole thing, and keep your eyes open for the next two (or three?) parts published sometime soon (maybe this week?).

Relative to your interests

• VMware Tanzu enhances support for generative AI and agents with Tanzu AI Solutions - “As customers move from AI experimentation to implementation, they stand to benefit from closer integrations between technology components as they redefine “Ops” frameworks within their businesses. VMware Tanzu AI Solutions are designed to do just that, with specific enhancements like AI middleware that boosts performance, fosters security and reduces time to value when it comes to operationalizing AI models and applications. Tanzu AI Solutions are polyglot for those who are unfamiliar with preferred data science languages or use other languages, and should appeal to Java developers with the launch of Spring AI. Spring AI also includes dedicated feature sets to control, observe, and evaluate models and, ultimately, agents, as organizations' AI capabilities progress. Model context protocol (MCP) is also supported in Tanzu Platform.”

• Identify, solve, verify - “My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.”

• Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027

• On the other hand: Gartner Survey Finds 45% of Organizations With High AI Maturity Keep AI Projects Operational for at Least Three Years // Lately, analysts have been coming out with an AI survey that says things are great, and then pairing it up with another that says they are not. Which way is it? Who knows - does it matter?

• Agentic Design Patterns, book draft

• Arriving at ‘Hello World’ in enterprise AI - The (slow) nature of digital transformation hits AI like a sack of bricks in the face. The brick avoidance techniques are the same as always, a duel approach: (1) sell a “business outcome” to execs, a measurable improvement to either making money or cutting costs (2) enable developers to smuggle in AI that is then more costly to get rid of than to accept. Each takes years to build up to big revenue. For the enterprise natives, well, it’s almost comforting.

• Highly related: doing anything new in enterprise IT is difficult, especially if things are basically working fine.

• Musings on The AI Con - Latest from the AI-skeptics: “ask more questions of those pushing AI into everything. What, specifically, is the goal? What is supposed to be automated by the new tool? What are its inputs and outputs supposed to be? What does success look like, exactly? What would count as failure to achieve the goal?”

• Trump’s pressure on Apple to make All-American phones ignores the last tech giant that tried and failed - If no one wants the product, it doesn’t matter where it’s made. // “In the end, Motorola’s failed U.S. adventure had little to do with where the Moto X was assembled, by all accounts. The phone simply didn’t sell well enough to justify a U.S. assembly line.”

• After 8 years of playing D&D nonstop, I’ve finally tried its biggest alternative - someone bought the recent Bundle of Holding, it seems.

Wastebook

• “‘Memes' are low impact / high transmissibility. Think cat videos or brief flash-in-the-pan cultural moments that get forgotten quickly. ” Hi-memes, low-memes.

• “Self-help-y semoitics.” Another good one.

• “University lore claims the Geneva Bonnet was made from a pair of 16th-century trousers that belonged to Protestant Reformation leader John Knox.” Sure, why not?

• “people who don’t always ‘do their best’ or ‘fulfill their potential’ are allowed to enjoy life, too?” Productivity for the rest of us.

• Related: “you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London.

I was accepted to speak at AI for the Rest of Us. I missed the first one, so I’m excited to get the chance to not only attend, but speak at this one. The English put on interesting, quirky conferences like this from time to time - it feels unique to them, but I’ve never spent the time to back that notion up. Anyhow, check out the talks, and you should come to it.

Also:

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

Logoff

My son does not like watching his videos around me. If we walk in the room, he’ll pause them, look-up, and smile at us. That’s a smile that say, “please, oh please, leave me alone so I can watch my YouTube.” This is a good moment to be a dad and say, “oh, it must be really good if you don’t want me to watch it! What is it!” and then sit down with him.

I soon leave. I’m not that dad-terrible.

Still, I walked in on this guy the other day. It was refreshing - not the usual Minecraft/Roblox yellers: boys playing video games, yelping and yelling about everything little thing.

But who is this? It’s not, as Google tried to guess, Mickey Rourke, William H. Macy, or even The Mouth of the South, Jimmy Hart.

I tried to get a discussion going about that shaved part of his mustache. No dice.

Whoever it is, this feels like a potential upgrade to (“expansion of”?) his YouTube taste.