-----Original Message----- From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Roger
'Rocky' Vetterberg Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 4:57 PM To:
Simon Burke Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org;
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FreeBSD's Visual
Identity: Outdated?
Simon Burke wrote: [snip]
2. If it wasn't for the interesting content and structure of the FreeBSD website, it would be among the less beautiful. Yes, it serves its purpose well by being simple and straight to the point. But
a redesign
could offer just the same -- simplicity and accuracy -- without being ugly.
Aesthetics are not everything, the web site does what its
supposed to do. Also i actually like how it looks. A lot of
people have strong feelings about all these all singing all dancing webistes. There is just no need. Keep it simple and
easy to navigate around thats all thats really important. If
the aesthetics really matter more than function to such people
who use BSD then they would probably be not using BSD but
either windows or linux, where you have a nice pretty GUI to
look at all the nice pretty sites.
This is where I think a lot of people simply does not understand the problem.
Roger I understand the problem, I wrote a book on FreeBSD integration in 2000. The problem is I think you don't understand the problem.
Im a FreeBSD user. I like FreeBSD because it does not have all the flashy installers and pretty GUI's that many linux distros seems to have today.
That frankly isn't the reason you should like it. You should like it because it works better than most commercial operating systems let alone most operating systems.
"The" reason? Like there was only one reason to like an os?
I like FreeBSD due to its lack of bells and whistles, but I also like it due to its stability, performance, ease of use and license, among many other reasons. Maybe I should have made that more clear, I do not wish to come across as a guy that favours an os based on one reason alone.
But still, Ive been screaming for years for someone to improve the website. Why? Anyone that has stood in front of a boardroom full of CEO's or similar and tried to promote the use of FreeBSD in a big organisation knows why. They might like all the facts about the os, the rock-solid stability, the lightning-fast performance and its solid reputation as a server os, but one look at the website and they will run screaming towards the nearest linux advocate instead.
Most of the CEO's I've dealt with don't give a shit on a shingle about a product website. What they care about is: 'can what I need done be done in a way that is a) cheap and b) works and c) won't lock me in to you'
I think we have a missunderstanding here. I already work for a big corporation. When I said that I was trying to sell FreeBSD, I meant that I was trying to get the company that I work for to chose FreeBSD over some other product. Im not a consultant of any kind, Im a fulltime employed technician trying to keep my employers network up and running.
FreeBSD meets criteria A and B really well but it does not meet C. Linux meets A and B but BARELY meets C. Windows definitely meets C and usually meets B and doesen't usually meet A.
The problem of course is that A and C are related. If I am a CEO and I sign a FreeBSD or Linux deal - and you are a sole-source provider, then once I have all my business processes into you, I'm locked into you. Once that happens my thought processes are that your going to become very expensive to me - why, because there's no competition to you out there. I'm not going to do that unless I trust you implicitly. And there's very few business people I am ever going to trust implicitly, save perhaps unless your a son or daughter, and even then I may not.
You have to understand of course that this is old-school knee-jerk thinking. The CEO's are scared to death of you Roger. They don't understand what your selling, they don't understand how to
integrate technology into their systems, they don't even understand
their current system.
As I explained earlier, Im not selling anything.
We are several technicians at my company, some of us prefer BSD while others prefer linux, windows, sun or whatever the flavour of the day is. Everytime we get a new bunch of servers or a new task needs to be done, there is a religious war before we decide what os to use.
Most of the time, the board wants a say in decisions like this, and BSD almost always loses this, due to a very unproffesional image. Since the company already has the expertise inhouse, the hardware has been ordered and everything is paid, they dont give a shit about price. When I tell them that BSD can do everything they want and do it good, they listen. When I tell them that its free, they listen but they dont really care. When the linux guys makes exactly the same claims and also is able to back it up with proffesional looking websites with success-stories cluttered all over them, they usually decide to go with linux and goes to lunch.
[snip]
We, the users, might not care about our image, but if we want to be taken seriously by the rest of the world we better do something about it!
I would suggest that if you really are this lit up about this issue that you direct your customers to you OWN website which is quite obviously superior to the FreeBSD one.
As I said, Im not a consultant or anything, Im just an employee. I do not have a website of my own.
Roger you are just being impatient. You haven't defined 'big' hereClearly, you have not tried to "sell" FreeBSD to a big corporation.
"Big" as in 6000 employees spread across a few european countries.
but if you mean 'big' in that the company has over 500 employees in an office building, then even you must know that the check
signers in these companies are almost never under the age of 40.
Most of them are over 40 and most of them came up through the sales
ranks, and not through the technology ranks. These are people who
25 years ago were partying their way through a business degree in
some university and the only thing that they really know well is
how to sell their companies products. That's why they work at a
big company, didn't you know? Deep down they know they are
incompetents and they are too scared to go out on their own even
when they could make triple the money if they really knew what they
were doing.
They don't really understand anything about technology infrastructure and they certainly didn't go to grade school or high
school with a personal computer in the house, like kids today.
And the worst part is that they matriculated during the time that
in business education in this country that the 'cog in the machine'
aspect of workers was totally emphasized. Their professors drilled
into their heads the idea that every worker in the company must be interchangable and they deep down detest and hate the idea of there
being any such thing as 'key employees'
Why do you think that the current federal government administration
just takes the position that workers need to retrain to the new economy, as if just retraining 100 million people every 5 years to new jobs is a good way to run the economy? This is a message that comes straight out of that generation and resonates with todays big
business movers and shakers. That is why these people are doing such a terrible job mucking up American big business today, the
current debacle with the airline industry is proof of that, and the
amount of bankruptcies over the last 6 years has been breathtaking.
Very few of these idiots are anything more than closet control
freaks.
To be successful in todays market you have to be able to
individualize your products to what the customers in the market
want, and there is no way for a big business to do that without
really drastically increasing the complexity of it's business
workflow. Customers today want you to stock 100 variations of your
product and build all of them to order, and they want it for the
same price that 20 years ago they would buy the cookie-cutter
version you could sell them for. The only way to do that is to
integrate technology completely in every last speck of business
process that a big company does, and it takes a crew of key
technicians to do that. The few big companies that have learned this aren't asking consultants what the damn operating system is going to be on the computer systems they are asking the consultants
to build for them. They are telling the consultants 'this is what
the end result needs to be, you either figure out how to get it for us using whatever things you want to use to get there, or get the hell out'
Roger, you really need to be dumbing down your presentations, these
CEO's your presenting to really don't understand all those big words. Instead of using "FreeBSD" use "UNIX" It's shorter and even the most sheltered of them understand that yooouu-nikx is something that runs computers like winders is. And rather than
telling them how many mega-bytes and giga-bits the nice new server
is going to run at, just tell them it's going to be big, and fast
and powerful like Arnold Schwartznegger. Get them sold on the idea
that your providing a -solution to their problems- not that your
providing them some freebsd system that is real cool and does
something they are pretty fuzzy about exactly what. If they start
asking you exactly how your going to do this don't get sidetracked
into a technologists conversation.
I advocate a more proffesional looking image, and you shoot me down and then tells me I need more bells and whistles in my presentations?
Im confused! My arguments to improve FreeBSD's image are almost identical to the ones you listed above.
For all I care the firstpage of freebsd.org could be a big picture of Schwartznegger with a BSD tattoe on his biceps, but try to suggest even a change of font on the site and people freak out.
In fact you might just consider hiring a professional salesperson that doesen't really know too much about what your selling. These CEO's really are more interested in things like when your going to be finished building the new system, who is going to train the end
users, how is it going to help them make money, how much money are
they going to have to pay for it upfront, and how much money they
are going to have to pay for it ongoing. The salesperson should be
figuring all that out with them first. You shouldn't even be
talking about operating systems until you have sold them on yourself and your company, and if FreeBSD really is an objection to
them, then they should like you enough so that they want you to
build a Linux solution for them. Once you get them hooked and after a year or so you can switch them over to FreeBSD.
I could be wrong, but I think we are suggesting basically the same thing, just on different places.
You seem to think that I should cover up FreeBSD's amateurish look by creating a protective shell of fancy words and presentations.
I suggest that we put the energy on actually fixing the image, and thereby eliminating the need of a shell.
Unfortunally, I have seen this discussion go down so many times by now that I already knows how it ends. The people that tries to make a difference is scared away by the "dont touch my website" crowd.
I will continue to advocate the use of FreeBSD, with or without help from the official website, but Im still hoping that someday maybe people will realize that not all decisions are made based upon the quality of the source, but on general appearance as well.
-- R
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