2008/11/18 Mark Zelden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Since you are the Simplist vendor I assume you must know that the > people you are responding to have Simplist. If you know they don't, > then prefacing all your responses with "if you have simplist" is nothing > more than advertising. I'd really hate it if all the vendors took your > lead and responded this way to questions. The archives would be > full of advise that most people couldn't use.
There's another aspect to vendor posting that in the past has tempered my comments. For a variety of reasons, some of our customers have explicit contracts with us to the effect that we may not use their name in connection with our product(s), either in any case at all, or more often, without advance permission (which is not always given). I obviously don't keep all such customer agreements in my head, nor are current versions casually available to me. So if I see a post from someone who I happen to know works for one of our customers, it may not be appropriate for me to say on a forum like this "since you have our product X, you could do so and so". So I can either send private mail to the person, or I can post publicly in a way that doesn't announce to the world that they have our product X, which is what Dave did. The latter at least has the advantage of telling other customers who have our product X how to do the same thing, rather then encouraging many private emails each seen by just one person. And if the customer wants to say on the list that they do have product X, then the conversation can continue in public, if there's more to say. Sure, there's also the possibility of getting our product name out there in public, but in my experience it's rare to get a product inquiry, let alone sale, from such a post, and it certainly isn't a big part of product marketing. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html