Flutterby™! : Competing against 2012-12-20 11:46:59.553829+00

Competing against

2012-12-20 11:46:59.553829+00 by meuon 3 comments

Am reviewing a powerpoint from a product manufacturer, about their software, and as I squint a litttle and read between the lines (and based on private info) realize this is a 100% current buzzword compliant vaporware product that might be built if you buy it. The problem is, it's from ACME*, and ACME* is huge entity worth lots of money, so the potential customer believes either/both:

a - it's an actual product.
b - they can create/deliver it.

In fact, they are a decent manufacturer of a fairly standardized commodity product, and they'll hire someone to build this (currently) vaporware system. But it's a darn hard thing to compete against. It does "everything". of course it does. It'll look like the last one I just hacked to make work, lots of unexplainable errors, an unusable interface direct from the "IDE of the day" toolkit and a fubared embedded Oracle installation. * - name changed

sounds like IBM, "sure it can do everything, we'll use Dojo it's like JQuery you'll like it - trust us, but you'll have to hire our professional services to make it function, but it will work. oh your team won't know how we did what we did, so pay us to train you or to run the servers. or one our our partners. thanks, now here are tickets to our event and we'll pay for golf and we'll even ask you to speak at a conference"

"some ability I don't understand" is a combination of variables including: Tits, golf buddies, payola, relatives, conflicting/complementing business interests, tits and payola.

But it's one of those things that drives the somewhat Aspergers me nuts about humanity in general: Sales is based on some ability that I don't understand that often seems to be orthogonal to quality.