On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 10:17:46PM -0500, Steven Lembark wrote:
>
>
> -- Stas Bekman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > Advertising in TPJ? But that's 'The Perl Journal'!
> >
> > Bundling with SA? But as Elaine says SA's already know about Perl.
> >
> > We are talking about advertizing in places where people don't know yet
> > about Perl.
>
> Brief bit of history:
>
> There used to be Informix, Sybase, Ingres & Oracle.
>
> Oracle stank. It was slow, quirky and difficult both to
> install and manage. People didn't like it.
>
> Especially DBA's didn't like it -- which is why it was in
> last place among the RDBMS vendors.
>
> They hit on a bright idea, however: Oracle stopped advertising
> in DBA rags. Instead they went to places where executives saw
> the ads. Places like Money, Forbes, WSJ. They also stopped
> selling to DBA's and went to manglement to begin with. Nice
> thing was that the upper-level folk simply didn't know what
> questions to ask and swallowed the Oracle advertising whole.
>
> Wasn't long before people were told to buy Oracle.
>
> This is not to say that the other companies didn't shoot themselves
> in the foot a time or two [99?]. But Oracle hit on a nice method:
> sell to the people who have the money; the nerds will figure out how
> to feed the thing either way.
>
> Sun does much the same thing w/ Java ads in management rags; IBM sells
> everything but condomes in executive literatore.
>
> Most of the resistance to Perl in IT shops comes from management --
> many of whom don't realize their people already use it. Ditto Linux.
> Question is how we go about convincing the folks who wouldn't know an
> animal book from Kipling.
I sure hope you are not suggesting to force Perl upon people by seducing
manglement. In SA and programmer circles, Perl is known. Some like it
(and presumably, use it), others hate it (often for good reasons).
Forcing Perl upon people by means of manglement will do Perl more harm
than it will do good. Unless you have an other agenda for Perl than I do.
Abigail
