Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 17:11:20 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: unknown@riverstyx.net (Tani Hosokawa) Cc: brett@lariat.org, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: poor ethernet performance? Message-ID: <199907221711.KAA06925@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9907201215560.27096-100000@avarice.riverstyx.net> from "Tani Hosokawa" at Jul 20, 99 12:19:57 pm
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> > I think that your arguments were designed to be defeatist. Do not ask for > > support for FreeBSD, and you are sure not to get it. > > Be a prick and be ignored. A Linux survey is not your soapbox, just send > them an e-mail (aka. use the proper channels). Actually, a piece of snail-mail would be much more effective than a piece of email, as advocacy goes. Having looked at the survey, I can see where it is possible to "be a prick" by filling "FreeBSD" into every text input field. On the other hand, I can see where there _are_ blanks where "FreeBSD" would be an apropriate answer, if the survey was answered honestly and thoughtfully, and thus the survey could act to raise awareness of FreeBSD within Borland's marketing department -- which is where the awareness needs to be raised. The only way you are going to get a FreeBSD port out of Borland is to have Borland's marketing department issue an MRD (Marketing Requirements Document) which specifies that FreeBSD be a supported platform. Period. The same goes for other software companies and their products, as well. One of the real problems with a volunteer project that contains students and others with little real-world experience is that there is a decided lack of experience with the commercial software developement process. This translates into an inability to "work the process" to obtain the results you desire. I think one of the reasons Brett gets so little respect in these circles is that he assumes that a reasonable person working on the project would have at least passing experience in a real-world software company (or company, for that matter), and therefore would not interpret a call to action on a survey as a call to SPAM the survey and increase its standard deviation, at the same time reducing its utility (which would truly be annoying to Borland). Brett: You need to spell out your reasoning a little better if you want to quiet the peanut gallery, and get people behind any advocacy project (e.g. the survey results looking like a "grass roots ground-swell" in support of FreeBSD as a viable market for Borland products). > Linux has enough people running around damaging its reputation as it is. > Did you see those e-mails that Mindcraft got? Unsupported knee-jerk reactions to percieved offenses are often damaging. > Sabotaging someone's survey is immature and irritating. I don't believe that this is what Brett was advocating. > Don't you think a few e-mails in the support mailbox asking for > support for a certain platform would be more likely to get you > what you want? I don't. Over the 20 years I have been paid to write code (I started young, doing consulting), I have yet to see an organization, with the possible exception of Microsoft -- though I have not seen inside Microsoft very deeply, that actually uses the support people as anything other than a very blunt instrument. Very few companies have that much organizational intelligence, unless they are a service company... and then, they are stupid in different directions. Call it an effect of the law of conservation of organizational I.Q.. A _paper letter_ to their VP of marketing... or _better_, one to each of their outside sales managers and several line sales representatives, each from different people with a widely scattered geography, and without coordination of content, would be _much_ more effective. Even better if they are time-staged so as to not all arrive at once. But the survey, as it currently stands (unless someone knows the names of the outside sales managers and representatives at Borland) is the most effective way currently available to indicate market potential to their marketing department. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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