The co-founder of the popular open source CMS Plone, Alexander Limi, yesterday announced on his blog that he has left Google. To quote:
I’ll be surprised if they manage to hold on to their top talent in the User Experience division for more than a year or two. That part of the organization is slowly rotting from the top down, and people have already started leaving. The wasted potential is truly beyond anything I have ever seen in an organization that is otherwise really well run, and has its priorities straight.
When Limi joined Google in August 2006, I said that the coming years would show whether Plone could flourish “independently of few key individuals”. Plone has indeed come a long way in recent years and the community has demonstrated real progress, even without Limis day-to-day involvement. Despite his day job at Google, Limi has kept an active role in the community and almost exactly a year ago, he kicked off a candid and interesting Plone strengths and weaknesses discussion on his blog, where he stated that “Plone’s future does not lie in web publishing”.
According to Limi, he will now be able to spend even more time on Plone, in particular the next major release, version 4, where Plone intends to focus on simplification, performance and usability.
To Google, Limi is just one departure out of 20,000+ employees. Still, the company has been battling with brain-drain for quite a while now. As the Guardian newspaper wrote back in 2007: Money can’t buy you loyalty. If talented employees keep leaving, this is definitely an addition to the list of risks to enterprise buyers that I recently listed in my comment on Google: A safe choice for the enterprise? Look for more analysis of this in CMS Watch’s upcoming evaluation report on Google in the Enterprise.
Quite a few of our community of practice members use Plone. On the face of it, this should be good news for them, but as always only time will tell.
