Sales: assume the product sucks and your job is to convince customers to buy a really shitty product
Product: assume that there is no sales and your job is to create a product that people cannot stop raving about after using it for few minutes
Client Services: assume the product sucks and your job is to still keep the customer satisfied
Edit: To clarify: Red Bull is, for me, THE epitome of marketing. They sell a tremendously unhealthy product (bacon-smell car) as something that is healthy, basically by connecting themselves with extreme sports. Red Bull IS extreme sports and lifestyle. How insane if you think about it.
I agree with you though.
It's pretty easy to attack a product with the argument that "you won't need" it. There are only a handful of things that humans truly need.
Marketing done right is strategic. It's about segmenting a market, targeting the right niche, and looking for the right positioning within the niche. It's about guiding the product towards both stated and unstated needs. It should happen before, during and after development. And yes it should also involve generating demand.
Starting marketing after the fact is like building quality into an already created product. Quality is designed in.
He was a marketing guy for the Sparc workstations that was Sun's bread & butter. Atleast for a brief window of time, the Java server-side experience was actually better on a Sparc than anywhere else.
Edit: In Microsoft's case with the CLR, I can see the cross-platform goals being mainly technical, but MS sells software and developer tools. So it makes sense for them to get everyone using their platform. Did Sun have an aggressive plan to control the ecosystem and sell tooling and whatnot around it?
Once it was being seen as the "death" of Microsoft, taking away the desktop monopoly and moving it into the browser. Well then it became a hammer to beat upon the enemy, and beat they did.
That it was effective against Microsoft ensured it would get funding and support, it also prevented some really useful things from coming to market from Sun at least (like a native compiler, ala gcj, in which to build Java 'binaries')
This might possibly be connected to the fact Sun no longer exists as an independent corporation.
You can safely say just "no longer exists". Oracle made sure it erased any trace of Sun trademark from anywhere it could. Now it is Oracle Java, Oracle VirtualBox,... I always wondered why they chose to totally eradicate this trademark instead of keeping it. Does anyone know?
One of the many reasons our stock price went from $80 to $2 methinks...
1) marketing is not sales - This is absolutely incorrect. Marketing is any communication that touches a prospect or customer. Copywriting is salesmanship in print. Sales is absolutely a key ingredient of marketing!
2) Marketing is about perception - Partially true... Branding is about perception, marketing is about much more than just perception.
3)Marketing is Ubiquitous - This time you got it right!!! Marketing is influencing every possible touchpoint with consumers.
We'll have to disagree on your characterization of Marketing as Sales, I see them as two very different types of communications. That said, I know people who flip back and forth between the two, and people who are really stuck in one side or the other.
Sales is a marketing tactic. The salesman is the media, the sales pitch is the message, and the prospect is the market...
The pitch and process might be different, but thats because its a different form of marketing than print or tv or internet,etc...
But... your sales team should be under the umbrella of your marketing department... otherwise you will have the classic conflict of bad leads vs. bad salesman, a classic environment where people can easily shirk responsibility and shift blame instead of recognizing that they are all part of the same process.
Thank you sir. Added your blog to my bookmarks.
Of course, picked vegetables are also decomposing at a certain rate - but they don't have a dead animal smell. This is also why I'm excited about Soylent, and I haven't seen them play up the sustainable/ethical angle as yet.
Isn't that the same for all dead vegetables as well? You can dry cure meat to a point where it will barely change if the environment is just right.
And dry cured meat is not relevant to my initial statement that to me, bacon smells like dead animal. Actually, jerky doesn't have that smell. I miss jerky, but I like cows more.
1) bacon's smell has nothing to do with bacon itself - it's the preservatives that are used just the same for vegetables (sometimes)
So you're just responding to a bad eating experience from long ago. I have the same - with fish. I can't stand being in the same room with it, I can't eat it without throwing up. I also know it's safe because for the first 3 years of my life I ate almost nothing but fish, and then I guess I ate a bad batch, and given my parent's habits I'm guessing I was forced to finish that. That's what's causing my aversion.
I like to say that it's animals (and plants) forced to swim in their own faeces all their life, even in human faeces near coastal cities where nearly all fishing happens. I know several other people who have an aversion to certain foods (different from allergy because aversion is psychological, allergy is physical). But I'm under no illusion that fish is actually unhealthy. On the contrary, I fully realize it's healthy (and yes, I make sure to eat/drink/season things with fish oil on a regular basis)
I would say that there's a lot of reasons you should reconsider vegetarianism though.
2) humans can't survive without eating the components of meat. There is no doubt about it, all human species are omnivores : while we can live for long periods without meat, it's risky, and going entirely without meat leads to death (even replacing meat with fish is risky). In the modern world it's actually possible to get a meat-replacing diet, using many components. Most vegetarians don't do it this way - they ignore the problem. Result : at first, slimming, which is what they're generally going for, and after a while (generally months or years) : sudden shutdown of a bodily function, or sudden death after a medical incident or blood loss (because it depletes stores of critical molecules they can't replace). Vegetarianism not healthy, it just slows the rate of depletion of critical proteins to a rate that won't cause issues for years (in an adult. Try it on a baby and they WILL die. E.g. http://naturalhygienesociety.org/diet-veganbaby.html )
A lot of vegeratians seem to think an attack against vegan/vegetarian diets is an attack against them. And because they've developed this psychological aversion, that there is something evil about a person trying to "convert" them. No matter the science behind it.
there's an argument that while vegetarianism certainly isn't an ideal diet, it's better than McDonald's. And that's probably true.
That has been asserted, not established. I assert that if one is a regular meat-eater, they no longer notice the corpse smell.
> 2) humans can't survive without eating the components of meat... going entirely without meat leads to death
Oh lordy, where do I even begin with this broscience. Allow me to introduce some actual Science.
In 2003, 42% of Indian households were vegetarian and ate no fish, meat or eggs[1]. There are many cultures around the world who abstain from meat for religious reasons, eg Buddhists and Hindus. I'm afraid this directly contradicts the outlandish claim that a vegetarian diet leads inevitably to ill-health and death.
2) a lot of Indian households are indeed "vegetarian", in the sense that they can't afford any meat (not even poultry). They replace it by eating animal fat on bread. Pig fat mostly. Europeans do the same thing, and today you can get it as a delicacy. It's a very original taste, but let me tell you. If you dislike the smell of bacon, this is unlikely to agree with you.
3) "There are many cultures around the world who abstain from meat for religious reasons, eg Buddhists and Hindus". Hindus abstain from eating cow meat (though not milk). I'm not aware of Buddhist attitudes, but the first line on wikipedia directly contradicts what you're saying [1]. Clearly it's only monks (which have been eating meat for -at least- 14 years as part of the general population). There are zero cultures around the world that abstain from meat alltogether. For obvious reasons : if you do, people die, without fishoil and pig fat ("food supplements", guess what they're made of ?).
4) how do you talk yourself out of the -many- cases of food deficiency caused by vegetarianism and/or veganism ? Not just the ones today, but the many documented attempts, for seafaring and other travels of vegetarian diets that resulted in death on a large scale. Large enough to alter outcomes of battles, kill entire crews and so on.
5) Also the tons of instances of babies dying from food deficiency where it was blamed -by medical professionals- directly on the diet of their parents ? I hope you're not planning on having kids - ever (although a kid will be fine with a vegetarian father, it's the mother that causes problems early on. Afterwards, not feeding the kid meat or fish is bad). Hell I checked in the supermarket here and the apple + banana baby feed mentions that infants can't survive on fruit alone, and you really should also provide meat and fish products, ideally both.
1. Everything you have said about Hindu and Buddhist vegetarianism is poorly researched and inaccurate.
2. If you are going to make extraordinary claims like "vegetarianism inevitably leads to illness and death", you'd better provide some compelling scientific sources rather than "zomg this vegan baby like totally died once lol XD".
Upon reflection I think you have just been trolling me. Poor show, HN is a place for serious conversation, not reddit style childishness. Jog along.
I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time.
Things I learned,
1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price.
2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and perceive it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-).
3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky.
Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.