Database Underground | Sean McCown | InfoWorld | Is There a Future for SQLServerCentral.com? | November 21, 2006 08:42 AM

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Is There a Future for SQLServerCentral.com?

November 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Is There a Future for SQLServerCentral.com?

By now it's no secret that SQLServerCentral.com has been bought out by Red-Gate. In fact, I even blogged on it last week. I've had a chance to talk to Red-Gate about it, as well as a few dozen users and MVPs.

Red-Gate says they intend to keep it as a community site and grow it as much as they can. However, they also plan to use the membership list. I didn't ask for what purpose, because why would I? We all know they're talking about marketing. And I suppose that's their right because they bought the site, but I know they're going to lose a lot of users over it. People don't want to be cold called by anyone. Without exception, everyone I talked to said that they're worried about how things will change with a vendor in charge. Red-Gate hasn't yet said how they're going to run the site, and I'm sure those things are still being ironed out. I do think however that we're all being naive if we think they'll let someone go on and write a review against one of their products. Pretty much the same way you couldn't go onto my personal site and tell me how horrible my daughter is. I'd pull it down the second it got posted.

Anyway, I had about half a dozen guys ask if I was planning to step up and host the next big community site. Honestly, I just don't know. I think it may be a little too early to completely write-off SQLServerCentral.com just because it's a vendor site now. I think the future will show that it'll still be a valuable resource, but it'll go the way of the rest of the vendor sites where you'll take what you can from it, and then move on to another site for objective opinions. It does always leave you with that vague feeling of "what are they trying to sell me" in the back of your head though doesn't it?

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be griping about MS not caring about DBAs, so stay tuned.

Posted by Sean McCown on November 21, 2006 08:42 AM

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Sean,

Thanks for writing about this, it is great to see someone of your high profile blogging about this.

I'd like to challenge your perception that someone couldn't say whatever they like about Red Gate or our products on any of our sites (www.sqlservercentral.com, www.simple-talk.com or www.red-gate.com/messageboard/index.php). They both can and do. If you look now at all of those sites you'll see a huge range of comments, mainly positive but sometimes negative. As you'd expect when you have 200,000+ users and millions of visitors.

We've enjoyed our modest success by being true to the SQL Server community by focusing on the long term. We bought SQL Server Central because we think that in the long term it can be even better. We'd never do anything to jeapodize that.

Thanks,

Simon Galbraith
Joint Chief-Exec
Red Gate Software

Posted by: Simon Galbraith at November 23, 2006 04:17 AM

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