Let my try to contribute my $.02: Usually, a PR item which tells about "company X delivered product Y to customer Z", is "signed" by both - X and Z. Since most of the organizations don't exist for charity but for business, Z must earn something out of this PR. Sometimes, the fact that Z agreed to be an early adopter and even to put its name on the PR, gives Z a small discount (irrelevant in our case). But the usual case is that only by using the product Y, customer Z succeeded to execute its extraordinary service, and here come some impressive numbers which could not be achieved without Y, and so on.
In other words, while the interest of X is clear, the interest of Z is more tricky, and usually Z uses this opportunity to tell the world how great he is. We owe Brian something, not only to "pay" him for putting the name of CNN here, but also to help him pass his legal staff. So this is, more or less, how I see the PR (not the announcement about 2.2, but specifically the CNN case) (and excuse me for my bad English...): ---------- Just an example, only to demonstrate what I mean ---------- After gaining more than 70% of the market (according to market research companies such as NetCraft and Security-Space), the future of the Apache web server looks brigher than ever, and it seems that it has no competitors anymore. But there is still one huge competitor that even Apache can't beat: Previous versions of Apache. "It just works, 7 days a week, 24 hours a days, serving millions of requests, without losing even one" says John Doe, a webmaster with the moc.com, which is ranked #0 among the hosting providers: "After all, even Steve Ballmer said 'Apache is simply better', so why should I upgrade?! If it ain't broken, don't touch it!". But now, with Apache 2.2 coming soon, more and more people argue: "We succeeded to hire the best reporters and journalists, but in order to keep our status as the most popular news site, it is not enough to create the best content, but we must find creative ways to deliver the enormous load required by our on-line readers" says Brian Akins of CNN. "Apache 2.2 allowed us the break even our own records, and reach an amazing number of 77 billion hits, although we started to use it only several days ago. I know no other way to deliver one billion pages per day" summarizing Akins. This is the message that the Apache Software Foundation tries to make these days: "Apache 1.3 is still the power behind most of the leading websites, but the new release combines the advantages of the old one with new fabulous features and abilities" says XXX, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, "and as an Open-Source product, it's free, so why not upgrade?!". "What are these new features and abilities?" XXX tries to shorten his answer, but the new release is so revolutionary, so the list looks infinite: "(and here comes an infinite list of the goodies of Apache 2.2)". The Apache web server is available for download from httpd.apache.org, free of charge. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This was only an example, but I hope you got the idea. The only problem with this direction is that some of the newspapers and TVs which should publish it, are direct competitors of CNN, and may prefer to edit it (bad) or even to ignore this PR (bad too). -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-5237338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel
