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On Saturday 25 September 2004 11:04 pm, Simon Avery wrote:
Then geeks aren't the ones to do it. Salesmen are.
Salesmen have the unerring talent for promising the impossible yesterday. The refreshing thing with GNU/Linux is that the developers don't promise you the earth, but they do deliver superb software that actually does what it should.
(Just my opinion, and I don't really like salesmen...)
I regularly see 'salesmen' at work (non-IT) and they consistently underestimate their target audience. Their sales patter doesn't stand a chance because they have only been taught the tag-lines. Let them face a cynical and knowledgeable professional and watch them cry. Literally. It's fun at Expo's and similar events when some companies send their sales team instead of their technical team. You get a little collection of visitors gathering to see how quickly the sales staff can be trapped in a hole of their own making. :-) Expo is largely preaching to the converted - more accurately preaching to the educated - I want detailed answers to real technical problems, not sales patter. Users believe salesmen, developers don't. Developers believe developers. The mistrust comes from the Windows world, it is hardly advisable to copy an illegitimate model to 'encourage' GNU/Linux uptake! I disagree about users, particularly home users, being left to their own mistakes - users need to be educated about computers, users need to learn for themselves. We've had this discussion before on this list and others, but especially where security is concerned, I cannot escape the problem that users must take responsibility for their own actions and learn. Security is not a package, it is a process. The lack of security in many home Windows boxes is flooding my systems with counterfeit drug spam. Fine, if the users are in a workplace where they have no direct control over the system - as in work, the staff neither know or need any config knowledge - but there is an IT helpdesk to deal with the problems that inevitably result. At home, where it is just the user and their computer, users DO need to know how to fix their own problems. In that situation, the home user needs to know who to contact when their knowledge runs out - their techie friend. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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