Beware of the ‘marketing cowboys’

ARKETING can be a rather sick ‘science’. The story that I present here should hopefully illustrate this. The other day, after I had played my 3^rd game of squash in this year’s competition, I got a free running technique (or stride) examination. This was conduced with a laptop (runs Winders, quite sadly) and a video camera.

Needless to mention, the intent was to sell me corrective footware by suggesting there will be horrible consequences without it. It’s the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) method to marketing some medicine or other remedies. Say to someone “there is problem with you”, then offer the cure. Moreover, part of the techniue is put the elixir close to one’s reach using, e.g. some leaflet. Some would argue this explains the separation between a doctor (who can’t/won’t directly sell) and the pharmacy where nothing is being prescribed. It’s like a self-supervising/moderating system; a peer-review framework if you like, and one which involves more than one person or practice.

Insurance companies like to take advantage of this sleazy marketing approach. I can recall a funny robots clip which aired on Saturday Night Live. In the video, robots are said to steal seniors’ pills and terrorise them. In turn, naive citizens are advised to buy insurance that covers no concrete threat. Greedy companies essentially cash in on ignorance.

Returning to my story which demonstates this case, I was advised to change sneakers every x miles (3-4 months). I was offered ‘special’ shoes that would suit me and was even pointed towards a shop that is run by the examiners. Being a computer-oriented person, I could not help thinking of ‘waste culture’ in this context, much like Vista’s steep hardware requirements. There’s also that old advice which says businesses should throw away malware-infected workstation. Go figure… or come to think of Live OneCare, which is a security product which Microsoft sells in order to protect its already-broken product.

I thank the folks who did the test for teaching me a lesson about myself (as useless as it was), as well as the (sort of) self-branded gift and leaflet. However, I am unlikely to fall for that marketing trap. As a child I saw my parent almost falling victim the the highly prevalent vacuum cleaner salesman tactic — reveal a lot of filth, spend many hours working without pay, then offer a pricey electronic appliance. I can’t recall if it was a Hoover or a Dyson.

The folks at Groklaw have just identified a Sun/Microsoft transcript, which used to reside on Microsoft’s Web site back in 2004. Fortunately, the text is still stored in the Web Archive and it’s a real eye opener. Have a look.

STEVE BALLMER: No, there’s a few things. First, we put in place — we deal with all of the antitrust matters. That has to — just so we have a foundation to move forward.

Second, we put in place what I’d best describe as a patent regime between the two companies that serves as a framework to make — to ensure that we don’t run afoul of one another in ways past or forward-looking that would be problematic to the technical collaboration.

Third, we agreed on specific technical collaboration as it relates to how you make servers and clients talk to one another across the network. And each of these is long and detailed and certainly the detail of that is best probably gone through with the key teams on both sides and there are folks here from both Sun and Microsoft who can do that. But there are things that need to get licensed in terms of making these things plug together over the network. There’s a licensing framework that’s put in place for that.

So I’d say that’s the elements and then if you take a look at the payment, some of the money is to resolve our antitrust lawsuit. Some of the payment takes a look back and says let’s make sure we are clean with respect to one another on patents. Some of it is forward-looking in terms of how we work together from a patent perspective. And then some of it is forward-looking, us to Sun and Sun to us, in terms of the licensing of key intellectual property that relates to making these things plug together and interoperate well over the network.

Deja vu anyone? The sheer resemblance between the two deals was mentioned before. Ever since, Sun Microsystems has moved closed to the GPL. They have recently selected the GPL for Java, one of their CPU designs, and they already speak about applying the same type of licencing transformation to Solaris. Meanwhile, on the contray, Novell seems to be going in reverse, back to its proprietary roots. It has escaped in persuit of temptation—short-term gains and egocentric existence.

Technocrat, which is the Web site where Bruce Perens initially (and correctly) predicted Microsoft’s yet-to-come ‘FUD campaign’, is reporting, through Bruce himself, that the “strong feeling on this issue seems to be very widespread”. Over 2000 people have signed his Open Letter. Meanwhile, ComputerWorld has just published an article titled “Microsoft and Novell pull a SCO”. Below lies a snippet.

The shape of this agreement suggests that Microsoft and Novell have learned from the best, the corporate strategic masterminds at The SCO Group. The scheme there, which you may recall Microsoft championed early and loudly, was to declare that Linux incorporated source code protected by SCO Group copyrights. This declaration gave SCO the power to send out threatening letters to software vendors and customers. The letters said, in essence, that the lucky recipient could pay SCO a license fee now, or risk having its name added to the big list of defendants in its case and pay far more.

As mentioned previously, this type of comparison is intended to stir up strong feelings and reactions. This may be an overstatement that instills fear, if not a case of ‘trolling’ for traffic, so you are advised take it with a grain of salt.

In the midst of a certain coversation today, an old story returned to my mind. It’s dated September 25^th, 2006. Thus, this happened roughly 4 months after secret negotiations with Microsoft had begun.

Open source software maker Novell said last Friday its board approved the increase of its president and chief executive’s base salary to US$825,000 per year.

I feel obliged to quote Mark Kent who said “Always follow the money. Anyway, all those people out there writing code which Novell sell on – your code has been used to provide the Novell Board with pay rises, and they’re agreeing that you are in the firing line for a Microsoft legal attack!

T turns out that Larry King, whom I recently mentioned, is not the only technophobe in showbiz. Have a look at this one.

According to Starpulse.com, O’Reilly dubbed all iPod users “geeks” and implied that those who bought one were socially inept.

In a move illustrating how in touch he is with young people he spluttered: “I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod. Did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them?”

Related: Ballmer’s iPod

While the impact of the petition may be nothing but words and promises, we also observe action being taken.

Professor Keats shared the mail with the South African anti-software patent mailing list, and gave permission to share it further.

Dear Stafford,

This is a personal email from me, not an official policy of UWC. However, as the custodian of IT at UWC, I will be pursuing a full investigation into a total exit strategy for all Novell products from the University of the Western Cape.

As a non-trivial CUSTOMER of Novell, we will be looking at all our Novell applications during the next 3-4 months, with a view to finding the fastest possible way to get ALL NOVELL PRODUCTS completely out of our environment. As a company that we have been customers of for over a decade, Novell has let us down badly, and as customers, you may expect us to vote with our feet and encourage others within the education domain to do the same.

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No-one other than Andreas Jaeger wound up praising Ubuntu for its Open Week.

Ubuntu’s open week sounds like a really good idea. I’m just surprised that it is done to get users away from openSUSE as Mark Shuttleworth announced on the opensuse mailing lists.

Andreas is one of the roots, if not the principal figure of authority, in the Opensuse project. To put things in context, Mark Shuttleworth invited SUSE developers whilst some people are giving up SUSE, often migrating to or sticking with variants of Ubuntu. This statement by Andreas is therefore quite bold yet generous. It does, however, seem as though Shuttleworth crossed the picket fence and invaded mailing lists of competitors. I am aware of Red Hat employees who read the SUSE mailing lists, but I doubt they actively participate rather than just lurk or post off-list.

Addendum:

Here is the message that started it all.

[opensuse] Invitation to OpenSUSE developers

• From: Mark Shuttleworth [mark at xxxxxxxxxx]
• Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 18:16:57 +0000
• Message-id: <45673719.9020906 at xxxxxxxxxx>

Novell’s decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community. If you are an OpenSUSE developer who is concerned about the long term consequences of this pact, you may be interested in some of the events happening next week as part of the Ubuntu Open Week:

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