--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > No, just an assumption that people decide to do things > because they hear something about other people doing > things. It's called "advertising," though it doesn't > need to be organized by the people with the "product."
You're in software, Lawson, so here's a metaphor that you should be able to grasp as to why TM and the TM organization are no longer even considered by most people to even be *players* in the world of meditation and self discovery. A company called VisiCorp invented the spreadsheet and marketed it. Their product -- VisiCalc -- basically created the entire PC revolution; people used to walk into the early computer stores saying, "I want a VisiCalc." The clerks would say, "No, what you want is a computer, on which you can run VisiCalc." And the customer would say, "Whatever. Just sell me a VisiCalc." They had the market pretty much cornered, just like the TMO did with meditation in the early days. For a while there, back in the late 60's and most of the 70s, if you thought meditation, you thought Transcendental Meditation. TM had become the VisiCalc of meditation. And then, on the VisiCorp side, the founders of the company got greedy and complacent and lost touch with their customer base. They doubled and tripled the price of their product without adding any new features, and reduced the quality of their after-sale customer service. Along came Lotus, and within a year or two VisiCorp was bankrupt, no longer even a player in the market. (As an aside, since I was there for this particular debacle, when VisiCorp went belly up, Ashton-Tate did the stupidest thing ever done in the history of business and hired VisiCorp's whole upper management team to replace president George Tate, who had thoughtlessly died on them. Within a year and a half, the geniuses who had driven VisiCorp into bankruptcy had driven Ashton-Tate into bankruptcy, too.) (As another aside, after Lotus -- started by a TMer -- stole the entire spreadsheet market away from VisiCorp, *it* got lazy and complacent and out of touch with its customer base and lost the entire market to Microsoft and Excel, as well.) Anyway, I think that the equivalence of VisiCorp and the TM organization is apt. Both had the market *cornered*, man. They were home free, if they had only done what was necessary to keep that market share. But they both pissed away any reputation and any allegiance they ever had, and both are considered jokes at this point by the other players in their respective markets. There is a lesson to be learned in this comparison, IMO, but it *wasn't* learned, and now it's too late. In the modern world of meditation and self discovery, the TMO is as irrelevant as VisiCorp is to the modern software industry. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
