Re: Defeating the evil that is Marketing <g>
On the other hand, Geoff, if left to the engineers products might
never ship until they are "perfect."
As always, some balance needs to be attained. As much as people love
to run down marketing and sales, without them there would be no jobs
in any commercial enterprise...and without paying gigs, the open
source people would also be severely limited in what they can do.
I agree with David. Marketing certainly plays a very large part in driving products and building the economy. However, driving defective products into a market quickly results in lost jobs for everyone involved, except, perhaps, the few who have the privileges of "golden" goodies.
IMO, the balance should tip in favor of the customer, whose experience with the product controls the product's success, and, of course, the company's continued success and survival.
I worked for a legendary large software company whose strong marketing bias at the highest levels overruled not simply engineering, but, significantly, Quality Assurance's case for fixing fatal problems before releasing the product! The released product lost customer data; some customers were lost, but many were retained with promises to "trust us - we're fixing it." Despite several management shake-ups, nothing changed this bias. Customers repeatedly lost their data, then, finally and irretrievably lost their trust, and moved to competitive products.
In this case, unlike the example of Bill Gates halting a broken release until the product was fixed, the Big Kahunas put hubris first, and the customers' interests last.
Peter Gold
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KnowHow ProServices
FrameMaker training, coaching, consulting, template design
http://www.knowhowpro.com
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