There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.
What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.
When I was younger, I sold turquoise jewelry at the Grand Canyon and I feel about the same towards sales and marketing, I mean they are the same with different levels of scale. I found an exception though, the way we sold in the shop I worked at would only teach people interesting things if they showed interest, explain the history, the nuances, give some background on the artist who made it, things like that. Even if there wasn't a sale the ones who took the time to listen still learned something interesting, and those who did buy now had something cool to tell to people who would ask them about it later.
So I guess I'm saying that tutorial style marketing is ok, but that's such a small amount of what passes for marketing nowadays, and marketing tends to always take anything and everything too far to the point of ruining it and whatever platform supports it.
>There's no form of marketing that I "like" or actively reward, at most there's marketing that I fell for.
For very high value software licensing agreements there's huge financial rewards for performing the marketing dance with the vendor. Paying list for enterprise software doesn't happen. Customers who even know what Oracle RAS is , or SQL SERVER Parallel, are numbered in the hundreds. The expenditure on manpower to design and commission a new major database installation is two to three orders of magnitude greater than the license costs. That's per database not enterprise wide. You embark upon a courtship from the outset.
This isn't what the article nor what most everyone's discussing, but I thought it worthwhile to offer a real illustration of a very viable means of sales and marketing that can be made to work if you have a high value application or service and can identify a small finite number of customers.
Edit: I probably should have said the number of customers who know what they're doing with the most sophisticated databases is very likely in the hundreds. Arguably the market is rather larger but if the behaviour F500 generally is any indication, there's a lot of nameplate and marquee buying driven by C suite egos. If you're selling a unique and expensive application this is where your margins are. And where tales of sales excess and bad reputation / hubris attaching to your product originate.
I used to be a bar manager 16 years ago and would often see the Anheuser-Busch marketing rep for our region out and about, and she would never fail to use her corporate credit card to buy me some free drinks. I liked that form of marketing.
I would personally say that while marketing elements exist within the essays, they are more like an attempt to influence the industry he operates in (tech focused venture capital) to as much an extent as he is capable with words alone.
His essays strike me as appeals promoting a certain manner of thinking that he wishes to impart, while also naturally acting as marketing simply due to his own default mode of thought being deeply entrenched in entrepreneurship.
Anything that comes from the primary source is an automatic nope, I'll only take positive accounts from third-party sources. Unfortunately, not even that is enough, so I've become wary of HN comments praising any particular product.
What's even more unfortunate is that you have to apply the same skepticism to open source "products" these days as it has become common even for open source projects to exaggerate the project's capabilities and be dishonest about its limitations.