On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Bill Moran wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> writes:
> >
> >>"LAMP" is just one of those stupid things that happens on the open
> >>source world: one product becomes "the one" and everything else
> >>gets ignored.
> >
> > Not only in open source. Remember Betamax? Technically a better
> > standard than VHS, but it died anyway because it couldn't get enough
> > market share. We should worry about the prospect that MySQL will
> > achieve such complete mindshare dominance that no other open source
> > database project remains viable.
> >
> > Great Bridge did a good job of marketing Postgres while they were
> > around. Red Hat has not picked up the ball at all :-(
>
> This is a wild generalization ... but it's just a friendly conversation.
> I've noticed that technically oriented folks don't tend to be the
> best marketers ever. I'm like this myself. I'll sit around and code
> into the wee hours of the morning but when it comes to selling my
> ideas to the people who would pay for them, I avoid it until my
> creditors are banging on my door.
> It's kind of surprising that more marketing-oriented people aren't
> drawn to open source, you'd think there would be the potential for
> big money there. The product can be obtained for free, you know?
> Anyway, just some thoughts. MySQL AB is a company that has people
> on staff that get paid to market MySQL. It's only logical that
> MySQL would get a lot of press. If a company made most of it's
> money off of Postgre, you would think their marketing staff would
> be creating quite a stir (just like the folks at MySQL do). Or
> maybe there's another way to accomplish the same thing? Regardless
> of exactly how it happens, the widespread knowledge of Postgre will
> come about because people actively work to get others interested.
Actually, one of the problems that we've (PgSQL, Inc) noticed with our
clients is getting them to publicly acknowledge/endorse using PostgreSQL
...
... over the past couple of months, we've provided onsite training to
several large companies, in order to facilitate them switching over to
PostgreSQL, but they keep the fact that they've switched over "hush-hush"
for internal reasons ...
