Adam Turoff [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
*>
*>As tom is fond of pointing out, and it's the UNIX CLI.
But tom isn't marketing to the PHBs. We sell boxes that go for over a
million dollars each much of which I credit to the blinky lights. I will
be scared the day some CEO takes a tour of the facility and asks 'hey, how
do I back this thing up?'
You miss the point completely in a country that is all about image
marketing. The technical details could be argued ad nauseam but while the
argument ensues someone else is smarter and markets their shiny happy
product that looks cool.
*>Last I checked, qmail is written in Perl, and pumps out a
*>decent amount of email traffic world wide. I can't think
*>of a more mainstream corporate application than an email server.
qmail isn't a commercial application marketed to companies as a
'enterprise messaging solution'.
*>And if you prefer Sendmail to qmail, no problem! I think
*>Sarathy is at USENIX talking about the Perl plugin for sendmail.
This is the technical side, not the marketing side but certainly no less
important.
*>My local PHB started humming when he heard there was such a
*>thing as PerlDirect and ActivePerl for Solaris.
Which is exactly why AS is doing this. No surprise there.
*>> WTF does WAP compliant mean? :)
*>See http://www.wapforum.org/
Adam, I was being flip. "$foo compliant" is just a lot of marketing hooey
because noone really knows what $foo is, but $foo compliant is warm and
fuzzy and sounds good on paper. This is marketing, not reality.
*>Someone *is* saying 'show me the money', and someone at Sun is giving good demo.
That's because someone at Sun _is paying attention_. Sell the idea and you
don't actually have to produce something that works.
*>What does the Perl community do? Ship working code, skipping the demos
*>and the marketing department in the process.
The Perl community fights over nits and IDEs and technical merit v. fluff
while everyone else is organised out there marketing the idea to get money
to support development. It's not 1993 anymore where the technical merit
alone could sell an idea. Being first in a market gets you 75% of the
sales/support for the lifetime of the market.
*>Because we tend to be engineers that prefer patches and working code to
*>marketing. Where would Java be if Kim Polese, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy
*>weren't on magazine covers at the rate of 12x/year talking about Java?
*>Probably as well known as Python, Perl or TCL.
Yes, but we are already sold on the product. The talking heads have
figured out that creating a buzz in the industry gets attention.
*>How many cover stories has Larry done? Tom? Andreas? Jarkko? A lot fewer.
Cover stories? Larry has done 2 to my knowledge. Marketing and PR require
an organised body behind the product to create an image that is consistent
and attractive.
*>Sounds like that would make a good tshirt, but wouldn't do a damn thing
*>for PHBs who can't find PerlDirect yet insist it doesn't exist. Would
*>do even less for PHBs who insist Perl is slow, and use C++ instead.
:) But it would get their attention. Take the 7-up ad campaign for an
example..brilliant as it is memorable. 7-up is a brand and so too could
Perl as is Java if that's the way you want to go.
*>The problem isn't reminding people that Perl exists.
EMC ran an full page ad in last Sunday's Boston Globe and the border of
the ad listed a number of technologies including Java, VBscript, PHP, sh,
awk...Perl was not among them. Yes, they need to be reminded.
*>The problem is convincing PHBs that Perl is ready for prime time.
We are 5 years behind the ball. Picking technical nits doesn't sell a
language any more than the technical details behind a million-dollar
storage array is sold by describing the gory details about the still
primitive technology that goes into it. We sell image, reliability and
storage wrapped in a nice box with superior support for a mere million or
two. The techies recommend but the CEO/CTO etc is the one that makes the
decisions. EMC isn't growing like it is because they sell a box with
drives that will store your data, that just works....
*>*: A surprising amount of Java marketing literature reads just as
*> accurately after s/Java/Perl/g;
Marketing is like reading the horoscope, if you read it long enough, some
vague generality will sound _just like your life_ hey! maybe this stuff
really is real...
e.
