Defeating the evil that is Marketing <g>

Subject: Defeating the evil that is Marketing <g>
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:27:39 -0500


It sometimes seems that the Marketing department has achieved power far out of proportion to their worth, and this often leads to bizarre situations at work. Consider, for example, the following anecdote from Eileen Gunn, about the early days at Microsoft (Locus, October 2004, p. 77):

"Everyone in the company who had worked with the Word beta test complained about how slow the product was, but product marketing insisted they weren't going to bump the ship-date to speed up the product. The day the code was declared ready to ship, I took the demo over to present it to Bill Gates, to show him how we were spending his money. No preamble. He shoved the diskette into his machine, booted it up, and started typing: tap-tap-tap-tap. Slooowly, the words appeard on his screen, slooowly it responded to his commands. Bill snapped, 'It's too slow! The demo's too slow.' I said, 'It's not a demo. That's the product.' … That afternoon, they postponed the ship date in order to optimize for speed."

I think it also shows the moral of the story: Marketing has clout, but they don't have the biggest cojones* in the company, and sometimes they need to be _persuaded_ to think again by someone with bigger cojones. The trick (speaking as user's advocate here) is to know who you can appeal to when Marketing loses touch with reality this badly, and having the courage to do it.

* Feel free to substitute a gender-neutral term. Me, I like flourishing my scant handful of Spanish and pretending to be trilingual. <g>

--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)

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