VanLUG Email Archive
Brian,
I agree with you completely. In fact, I think that many IS people are
tired of dealing with all the glitz and marketing. Most IS people I have
talked with are aware of the effect that marketing has on their
superiors, the accountants, and computer-illiterate middle and top
management. What they want are exactly what you said: "Just the facts,
ma'am". We would provide them a resource for information that they can
go to their superiors with and beat every marketing argument the MS
crowd puts forward with facts.
The payware companies will always outgun Linux-anything in marketing,
but we (Linux systems) have the upper hand from a technical perspective.
We need to give the rank-and-file ammunition so that they can make a
convincing argument to their companies' decision makers.
The "Just the Facts" approach will appeal to many people at Comdex - it
will give them a rest from the hype that makes Comdex such a suffocating
environment. Put it on banners. Put up signs like "Get the facts from
booth ...". We should make a point to visitors that we're not here to
fill their head with empty promises.
We'd need flyers with cost-of-ownership data, cost of implementation,
time to rollout, maintenance hours a year, avg number of reboots per
year, and so-on. Real stats. Just the facts. "Easy point-and-click"
promises are what makes these people mad - try making MS Exchange do
something different sometime (like forwarding e-mail to a different
server without using either Outlook or the Exchange client), and then
try sendmail or qmail. Get my drift?
Cheers,
Jan