Re: business perspective

On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 04:25:21AM -0400, Ryan Mahoney wrote:

> Good
>   - corporate look and terminology
>
> Poor:
>   - vague tagline (architects of internet messaging.... shall I call them
> if I need a message architect?)

It appars to me that the "poor" item above is actually an instance of
the "good" item ("corporate terminology").  Corporate-speak any more
is often a mixture of empty blowhard phrases like the second example.

Rather than using "corporate" terminology, it seems to me that
offering straight, to the point descriptions and clear technical
documents is the sort of thing that postgresql.org ought to do; and,
_does_ do, admirably (though not always perfectly).  If the idea is
to make corporations feel better by adopting a corporate mindset, we
might achieve at best a pyhrric victory.  We could easily end up with
a big stinking pile of crfty code that is supposed to do everything
(a large corporate RDBMS and a well-known small RDBMS-ish interface
to the filesystem strike me as two examples of this) rather than the
fast, elegant system that we now have.

I'm not saying the suggestions you've offered are bad ones, nor that
market share is unimportant; I just think that, in the same way that
not adopting primarily corporate attitudes to software has resulted
in good software, not adopting corporate attitudes to marketing might
result in good marketing.  The actual use of Postgres by corporations
is proof that good, solid software will win in at least some
situations.  And PostgreSQL is never going to satisfy those who feel
they'd like to have a company to sue if something went wrong; for if
you are foolish enough to think that you could extract damages from
an Oracle, an IBM, or a Microsoft then you are either insusceptible
to rationality, or sufficiently rich you could throw programmers at a
flaw in Postgres as quickly as your vendor could to fix its software.

A

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