Ruby on Rails - not ready for primetime?

I found this very intriguing and well-thought out blog post by Google engineer Cedric, in which he dialectically predicts the reasons Ruby on Rails won't be a hit with mainstream developer audiences. He's absolutely right. (Like Cedric, I'm a dev working with - and loving - RoR, so this isn't a bash piece.)

The main thing I see holding new age web frameworks like RoR and Django back is a lack of formal, structured marketing, a key cog that the latter platform's creator, Adrian Holovaty, admits in an RoR podcast. Like it or hate it, you've got to respect Microsoft's marketing push. The billions they've invested in community evangelism and peer development is what pushed ASP.NET to the front of the framework pack at a Mercurial rate. I enjoy open source concepts and projects, but it's the "born of the community" tag that so often runs fear through the blood of many a CIO. Viral marketing is great (and these days, necessary), but so is the tactical variety.

That there continue to be concerns of the legitimacy of open source platforms and products reinforces this belief. Heck, even the mighty PHP can't fully escape the stigma of being open source...a major contributing factor evident in that not a significant number of large, enterprise-level web platforms run PHP as their framework. At least not that many when compared to those running .NET or J2EE backends.

It's all about plausible deniability. The business world wants to have a formal organization that it can hold responsible, point fingers at or take to court in the event something goes wrong. And they feel better about working with, either directly or indirectly, with a known, trusted partner. There are smart, coherent, collected people driving the direction of the development of the framework. Certainly this is starting to take shape with RoR, but in fragmented fashion.