Defeating the evil that is Marketing <g>

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

It sometimes seems that the Marketing department has achieved power far 
out of proportion to their worth, and this often leads to bizarre 
situations at work. Consider, for example, the following anecdote from 
Eileen Gunn, about the early days at Microsoft (Locus, October 2004, p. 
77):

"Everyone in the company who had worked with the Word beta test 
complained about how slow the product was, but product marketing 
insisted they weren't going to bump the ship-date to speed up the 
product. The day the code was declared ready to ship, I took the demo 
over to present it to Bill Gates, to show him how we were spending his 
money. No preamble. He shoved the diskette into his machine, booted it 
up, and started typing: tap-tap-tap-tap. Slooowly, the words appeard on 
his screen, slooowly it responded to his commands. Bill snapped, 'It's 
too slow! The demo's too slow.' I said, 'It's not a demo. That's the 
product.' … That afternoon, they postponed the ship date in order to 
optimize for speed."

I think it also shows the moral of the story: Marketing has clout, but 
they don't have the biggest cojones* in the company, and sometimes they 
need to be _persuaded_ to think again by someone with bigger cojones. 
The trick (speaking as user's advocate here) is to know who you can 
appeal to when Marketing loses touch with reality this badly, and 
having the courage to do it.

* Feel free to substitute a gender-neutral term. Me, I like flourishing 
my scant handful of Spanish and pretending to be trilingual. <g>

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)

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