On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:04:34 -0500, Tom Metro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sean Quinlan wrote: [...] > If Amazon, Yahoo, Ticketmaster, etc. are already using Perl in a big > way, then why not put effort into making that more visible? > > One way is through a silly button campaign. "Built with Perl", "Powered > by Perl", whatever. We've all seen them around for other products. I've > even seen them for Perl, though I don't recall there being any standard > or effort to encourage them. > > If such a thing existed, the next step would be getting the big name > users of Perl to put them on their sites. It's better that an IT manager > notices that Amazon uses Perl when he is shopping for books, than having > a page somewhere on perl.com that lists Amazon among the big names.
This step is easier said than done. Small companies have an incentive to not talk about their technology very much. As for why, Paul Graham put it well in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html: And so, I'm a little embarrassed to say, I never said anything publicly about Lisp while we were working on Viaweb. We never mentioned it to the press, and if you searched for Lisp on our Web site, all you'd find were the titles of two books in my bio. This was no accident. A startup should give its competitors as little information as possible. If they didn't know what language our software was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it that way. When it comes to large companies, that real estate becomes valuable territory and they're not going to donate it for free. The technology you use is an internal decision. It has no relevance to the customer. What is the business case for putting it out there? If you're going to ruin your branding by advertising something, any healthy business is going to advertise something that makes them money. Think about things this way. If you were selling, say, cars, how much would you expect to have to pay to get that advertising on those pages? That's the amount that you're asking them to give away. What's your business case for doing so. That it would be great for you? There are lots of people and groups who could say that. What about for them? > Another approach would be to get people from these companies to > contribute articles to general IT publications. It's great that some of > them show up at Perl conferences, but that's preaching to the converted. They do from time to time. However even that is not really in the company's interest. It is very much in the interest of the person who gets published since it looks good on the resume. But it means that this valuable employee either is likely to cost more or may leave. And probably doesn't help your core business. (Unless you're in a business like consulting, in which case you're likely to value the publicity.) Actively discouraging employees from publishing is likely to cause them to leave as well, so smart companies don't discourage. But they don't generally encourage either, and aren't about to start. Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
