Dugg

Quoting: tracy: what I'm saying is not that marketing is unimportant, but that Ken is not good at marketing. Smile

I have no formal training or education in marketing, but - as the old saying points out is inevitable - I have an opinion, and I'm not afraid to express it. Wink I've also seen plenty of terrible marketing campaigns undertaken by people with *lots* of training in marketing, so I don't think that having marketing training is a reliable indicator of being good at marketing.

The problem with the extreme hyperbole approach to marketing is that it rapidly induces fatigue, especially when the results never match up to the promotion.

This is why no-one, anywhere, trusts politicians any more. A lot of politicians, at least some of the time, act like Ken; every time they come up with or are pushing $IDEA, they act as if $IDEA is the only important thing in the world and will solve everyone's problems (or at least, all the white people's problems, or all the problems of poor black single mothers on the west side, or whatever constituency they're trying to appeal to that week). If $IDEA ever gets put into practice, it inevitably affects things far less than they promised it would, and people notice this. They're not *stupid*.

So what you get in the end is the knee-jerk cynicism and lack of interest that characterizes most people's relationship to politics these days. It's the ultimate source of the commonly expressed views that politicians are overpaid, venal, corrupt, what they do doesn't make any real difference, and the people who really matter are businessmen / sports stars / the Church / whatever other institution the person you're talking to has actually seen make a visible impact on their life experience.

Sorry, long sidetrack. But this is essentially what Ken does.

For those who said they don't know his previous efforts - remember the whole thing about having 'Linux' sponsor a car in the Indy 500? That was Ken. Now, there was a big argument about whether that effort was actually useful at all, but that's not the point here. Even if you assume it did something positive, Ken promoted it - for months - as if it was the most amazing idea ever, the One Thing that would push Linux to the forefront of the minds of everyone in the world. He talked about it causing Linux to receive "all the month-long hype, time trials and media coverage it is going to receive", and it just didn't. News outlets don't *write* stories about minor sponsorship of minor Indy cars. He was overpromising. If it did anything good at all, it was probably about the equivalent of Red Hat running a series of print ads in the mainstream computing press. This happens all the time, and Red Hat does not issue press releases describing it in near-millennial terms.

Now he's doing it again. He's getting a few people in a small town to try out Linux. This is a good thing (and something that lots of people do, all over the world, all the time). It is not "a chance to make history". It is not "One of the most ambitious and important projects ever attempted in the Linux Community". He's over-promising again.

That's just not good marketing. In the end you get a "boy who cried wolf" effect.