> What we need, I think, is to reach the people in management making the
> decisions. These are people who do not go to www.perl.com They do go to
> trade shows and they do read (glance at) direct mail. I was at Internet
> World in London the other day and all the content management systems
> (vignette, mediasurface etc) have nice little glossy pages showing how some
> web site works wonders with their product. We should have no trouble finding
> such studies for Perl - the problem is that Perl doesn't ever have a stand
> at the trade fairs.
might be worth taking a look at how oracle got ahead.
for some time oracle was known as a difficult package to manage,
finicky to start up and difficult to recover. any benefits in
speed it had were more than offset by difficulty in getting it
set up and keeping it running.
at that point they were way behind sybase and informix in the
market. then they stopped marketing to nerds and started selling
to managers. their ads in tech rags dropped off and they started
taking out pages in the WSJ, Business Week, etc. two results: the
folks w/ money saw the ads, and they were the ones least able to
ask penetrating questions about the product. result: oracle is #1.
they managed to overcome the scuttlebut by (a) not refuting it and
(b) offering an alternative explination to the folks who decide on
what products to use. result is that people who want oracle like
a second... whatever, end up having to run it throughout the company.
in effect, oracle "reversed" the myth.
most of the arguments in favor of perl are addressed at nerds.
problem is that the "myths" come from non-nerds who get thier opinon
either from Nerds to Don't Like Perl(tm) or other non-nerds. since
bad news is easier to repeat, the bad news is repeated more often.
one obvious thing to do is find non-nerdy ways to say that perl works.
things that sound "managerial". other ways would be to find examples
*outside* science and high tech where perl is used effectively. most
people will shake off the genome project or nasa with "well that's
fine for them. REAL people...". the vision of high-tech people using
the product actually scares them off.
an ideal "picture" would be medium-to-small industrial or service
companies using perl to get ahead somehow. that gets more of a "Hey,
if Joe's Cesspool Reamers can use it so can I."
--
Steven Lembark 2930 W. Palmer St.
Chicago, IL 60647
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 800-762-1582
