Flutterby™! : content management 2000-09-28 22:46:46+00

content management

2000-09-28 22:46:46+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Wow! Good day on the CMS List. Steve Yelvington had a great note on marketspeak versus product which started out: Here are some things I have learned from dealing with vendors. "We support" means "we heard about that stuff the other day, and if it makes you buy our stuff, we're all for it." "High performance" generally means "tried it in the lab with a single user and got some stuff to show up a couple of times." And Karl Fast gets my vote for quote of the week: One way of explaining this is that we tend to think of web pages as being descendants of the printed page in much the same way that children are descendants of their parents, but I think it's more like the relationship between humans and chimpanzees which are genetically similar in almost every way but clearly very different. Zeldman and Siegel take note!

Speaking of market speak, I went to the Atlanta Interop show last week. Over and over I looked at the booth, read all the words and had to ask: 'what are you selling?'. Often they could not explain. 'We are solution providers.' But what do you do? 'We provide solutions.' But what do you sell? -- and I walked away. One outfit, which I never did understand what they were selling -- had placards showing they had garnered 31 million in venture capital since August of 99. Maybe I don't want to see the fact: Silicon Valley is about hype, not stuff. They are sellng hype - 'market speak'. Tell me - can a Silicon Valleyite explain - is this the fact, Jack? Fuckedcompany.com has become a great read for me. It sort of represents reality reasserting itself. Ziffle

I think I mentioned about a year ago that I overheard a conversation in a coffee shop that went on for a good half an hour about funding structures and so forth of a guy's company before the other participant in the conversation said "what does the company do?" A good portion of the valley is about hype, not stuff. Many of the overfunded B2B .coms are just different marketing techniques for old-school companies like print shops, but somehow they think that the net is going to make the demand for business cards and letterhead increase 10 fold. In much the same way that the consumer oriented ones before them were. Yep, most of it is about hype, which is why I'm interested in selling services and products to them rather than actually playing that game, most of the gold rush miners ended up broke, it was the guys who sold 'em the shovels that made money.