Alex Hudson wrote:
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote:
You might really say that this is a problem of Open Source as a whole. Its marketing really sucks.
Double plus for Free Software.
Similarly and earlier, Leon Brocard wrote:
[Perl PR] needs people to just do it. The right place for this discussion is the perl advocacy mailing list ...
I find Mark Dominus's points - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/12/advocacy.html - very persuasive (summary: advocacy can easily decend into a tribal "Perl rocks, $WHATEVER sucks", which is neither persusasive, nor good for a language such as Perl, which improves by borrowing solutions from other languages).
"Sell the benefit - not the technology".
Does that apply to _anything_?
<snip/>
According to the book I've read about marketing[0], customers make purchasing decisions based on perceived benefits (rational or otherwise) as opposed to features.
<example>
If you used Perl you could use the Foo module from CPAN (feature). Your script would take 5 minutes to write (benefit) and you could take the rest of the day off (benefit).
</example>
From what I understand of the other book I've read about marketing[1] the Interweb has broken a lot of the 'broadcast' marketing model (but probably not the benefit selling bit).
The perl community were/are probably pioneers in the gonzo approach to marketing. IMHO as most Perl advocacy takes place online, anything much more formal wouldn't produce many, er, benefits.
$0.02
[0] http://tinyurl.com/kent [1] http://tinyurl.com/keoa
-- Paul Sharpe Tel: 619 523 0100 Fax: 619 523 0101 Russell Sharpe, Inc mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 4993 Niagara Avenue, Suite 209 http://www.russellsharpe.com/ San Diego, CA 92107-3185
