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| Saturday, July 29, 2006 |
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Cover guy 
| | I'm still trying and failing to get a good shot of J.P. |
Markets +/vs. Marketing
| | Markets Without Marketing, an essay I posted a week ago at Linux Journal, was intended for a narrow market. In this case, engineers, programmers and other professionals on the supply side of technology. That is, people who make stuff, rather than people who buy or use or promote or sell stuff. Linux Journal readers are mostly makers. |
| | The room was full. All of the people who came up afterwards had positive and constructive things to say. Interesting and useful dialog followed, and spilled out into the halls. (One guy took amazingly complete notes. I want to give him props for that, but I can't find it now.) |
| | The only negative response was from a person who said I should have declared myself as a marketing-hater, just to make things clear. |
| | See, at the beginning, I asked how many people in the room were from marketing. About a quarter of the hands went up. Maybe fewer. Then I asked how many hated marketing. Most of the hands went up. Then I asked how many were marketers who hated marketing. One hand went up. (My estimates may be off here. If you were there, feel free to offer your own perspectives and recollections.) |
| | Meanwhile, outside the room — in blogs and in comments to the original Linux Journal piece — the whole effort got, well, mixed reviews. Hugh's first reaction was negative. After I responded in his comments section (second from the bottom one, currently), he went positive. Tara wrote, |
| | Why is engineering and marketing put at such odds with one another? In Doc's latest very smart, but stereotyping-heavy, article, "Markets without Marketing" this dichotomy rears its ugly head again. |
| | Unlike Hugh, I do agree with Doc when he surmises that the spin-doctor-sales-type- marketing-hack between the engineers and the customers should disappear. But like Hugh, I also disagree with him. Are all marketers hacks? And are all engineers good communicators when it comes to the technology they are working on? |
| | I didn't say either of those things. But then, I was being a bit hyperbolic in that piece. Cluetrain was hyperbolic too. The difference was, Cluetrain was for everybody. People of Earth, it began. When Chris Locke wrote we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it... the we was everybody. That the second person in that statement was marketing is less important than the the first person voice the statement expressed. Still, I appeared to side with engineers, against marketing. The context was unclear to those outside of it. After all, it was read by many more people than just Linux Journal readers and OSCON attendees. |
| | In any case, I was trying to make points that transcended the whole versus thing, about the need for makers and users to get in closer touch, with or without help from marketing. |
| | Anyway, my take-away is that I could have used an editor. We live without those in the blog world. This has many more upsides than downsides. Looking back on this episode, I see evidence of one downside. |
| | Meanwhile, I will have the visuals from the talk up on the Web soon. Probably Monday. And I'll probably recap the talk in next Thursday's SuitWatch. |
Miles to go
| | It isn't midnight yet, so I'm still 58 here in California. Of course it's close to 3 hours past midnight in New Jersey, where I was born 58 years, 364 days and a few more hours ago. (Technically, sometime in late morning.) |
| | I started blogging when I was 52, I just figured out. For whatever that's worth. |
| | This last week I got to hang out briefly with old friends who are my age and now retired. I can hardly imagine what that's like. They seem happy, though. |
| | I just figure it's good to be alive. Life, not death, is the exception. It's a bigger mystery than death. |
| | I was looking today at the house we're building. There are fossils of trees, plants and large vertebrates in the rocks of our walls. The marble in our bathrooms, like all marble everywhere, is solid bone. So is the travertine in the bathrooms of our last house. The wood in the floors and all the studs and joists and rafters and beans are milled body parts of dead trees. Plastics are derived from petroleum, which is liquid fossil matter: dead plants and animals. The gas we'll burn in our stove is another byproduct of death. |
| | Everything else we see in the universe, as far as we can tell, is not alive. It may be interesting, but activity is not life. |
| | Far as we know, the only life in the universe is here on Earth. |
| | So I'm savoring what I've got left. |
| | Britt Blaser describes life as a loaf of bread. Yours may end up having 80 slices, or 40, or 14, or (like my grandmother) 107. His case: it's a full loaf, no matter how you slice it. |
| | Nice metaphor. But I'm hoping to divide more ways before I move on. |
| | We'll be heading to L.A., I think, this weekend, just for fun. There's the Getty, which I've never been to. And a kite thing on the beach at Redondo on Sunday. Not sure yet what we'll do. Need to get some sleep first. |
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