bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (12/05/85)
[I am going way out on a limb here, please give me some consideration before feeling compelled to attack things, maybe personal mail first] I have noticed a certain pattern in the arguments regarding this CONCURRENT posting that has caused some flamage: I notice that academic sites tend towards 'it was a commercial and inappropriate' and commercial sites tend towards 'forgive the guy, he was a little overzealous' (I am in both senses in the former group.) Maybe I am imagining this. Is there more to this than meets the eye? Are commercial sites lusting after the opportunity to push their wares on USENET? I have received calls from numerous companies asking me to trial their product who have indicated that the reason they called me was that I was 'visible' in the USENET technical groups. Basically, I ignored the comment and treated it like any other product I might have tried, I only tried it if I really might be a customer (my time is far too valuable for anything else) and only mentioned it if I felt truly compelled to do so by what I perceived were the interests of people on the net (in fact, before you jump to any conclusions, try to pull out any such thing I may have written, I think you'll find you are only imagining there is an issue here with me personally, but who else can start this very important discussion but one involved?) If you are active on the net and think you would never do such a thing but have gotten these nice offers to try some product, think again, if you don't bring it up in conversation you probably never realized why you were called (they are usually smart enough not to push the point.) It's amazing what our egos can rationalize. Is this backhanded advertising? Absolutely not as long as no advantage (other than early viewing of the product) was taken (tho, of course, what would happen if one of these vendor's called me back and said, without reason, hey, keep the box, say after I stated that I was impressed on some group?? Well, hasn't happened, so that's academic. Also, so long as one feels free to praise or damn the product it is ok (silence is always another choice, if I felt the product was lousy I might just tell that to the vendor and forget it as I assume most people don't want to hear about it anyhow unless it is likely a scam they might fall for. About the only thing I damn a vendor for is not knowing when to listen, well, pure incompetence also.) Of course, who out there is being less scrupulous? How many 'innocent' product reviews have you read in the technical groups? How many comments about a product can really be distinguished?? What's the point Barry? The point is: slowly and silently USENET may have grown to become one of the most effective advertising mediums in the industry. People *READ* it, a lot of it, not all the random groups, but it is clear that decision makers out there are reading esp the technical groups, they *BELIEVE* a lot of it (woe to them :-), they probably are telling the vendors that "hmm, well I heard thus and such on net.unix-wizards..." They hear that kind of comment. It is full of network personalities who are incredibly talented and have incredible crediblity (ugh) because their opinions are perceived as more or less untainted by anything much more than some insane desire to say what they believe, and I believe that to be true in most cases (people have biases, their work etc biases them, but I think the sincerity is very high, especially in the technical groups.) This may factor in very strongly in this discussion of an ad like CONCURRENT's, they are not the only one and I agree that all in all it was not serious enough to damn them (I replied with a personal note which was never answered however, wonder if that's what their lawyers recommended, or just too swamped? or rude?) And surely if we decide to strengthen the ground rules it should only apply to new offenses. What is going to happen when the dams burst (and they may) and struggling, overzealous vendors just say the hell with it and post what amounts to carefully worded ads (or is that what just happened!)? Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. Oh, we can cut off their feeds maybe, bet you a dollar that never happens, not once, cuz no one will agree that it was not 'just one offense' and harmful. Also, the precedent will be resisted by the important commercial sites on the net as we see happening here. The essential anarchy of the net makes such rash actions highly unlikely. If it ever happened it *might* be a vendor too stupid to couch their posting in a technical discussion, repeated offenses (like weekly for months) and be unfortunate enough to find their feed is a university that has no interest in them (that in itself is interesting, when will we see the first lawsuit between two attached vendors who decide it would be good strategy to cut the other one off from the USENET? Sure, there's no contract, but that's not all it takes given some hyperactive lawyers.) Honestly, I don't want to single out CONCURRENT (well, I do a little) but didn't we just go through this with some new chip set and shareware. Do you think this is the last of it? So, the question raised is: Are we just being naive? -Barry Shein, Boston University
rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (12/07/85)
Barry Shein (Boston U) on commercialism, naivete', etc. and the CONCURRENT posting: > ...academic sites tend towards 'it was a commercial and inappropriate' > and commercial sites tend towards 'forgive the guy, he was a little > overzealous'... > ...Is there more to this than meets the eye? Are commercial sites lusting > after the opportunity to push their wares on USENET?... I don't think so. For example, we at NBI would never think of using USENET to try to advertise our products, in spite of how useful they could be to a lot of the USENET community. In fact, let me just tell you a little about those products...:-):-):-) Seriously--(1) The CONCURRENT posting was in the wrong newsgroup and contained the wrong information--it probably belonged in net.net-people, where name/address changes normally belong, and it probably should have been limited to an "x is now y" note along with some minimal info to let current customers figure out what happened. Whether you consider that "inappropriate" or just "overzealous" might depend on what you perceive to be the commercial value of such a posting. From academia, it probably looks pretty commercial. From the commercial world (where I currently sit) it looks like it has pretty minimal advertising value even if you neglect that the way it was handled was dumb. (2) I don't think that commercial sites are really lusting after USENET as a market, because by and large the USENET community is not the group of people who will make the money decisions. In a serious marketing effort you try to focus as directly as possible on the people who make purchase decisions and who are in your perceived market. USENET has lots of students, short-term users, unpredictable readership (.newsrc's), etc. It's also a medium where tendentiousness is the rule and where your competitors or their partisans can jump down your throat with minimal attention to decorum. These factors override the consideration that it's "free" by some bizarre standard. > I have received calls from numerous companies asking me to trial their > product who have indicated that the reason they called me was that I > was 'visible' in the USENET technical groups. That might be a difference in effect between academic and commercial netters...I've had at most a couple of such calls in about two years on the net. A little discussion here? Have people who write in technical groups gotten a lot of ad calls as a result--if so, are you in academia or, uh, commercialia(?)? (I'll summarize if you email notes on this.) And one more on CONCURRENT: > ...(I replied with a personal note > which was never answered however, wonder if that's what their lawyers > recommended, or just too swamped? or rude?)... Which says that perhaps CONCURRENT isn't much interested in any advertising effect of USENET--or if they are, they're not following up as they should. If this current posting of Barry's doesn't get some response from CONCURRENT, I'd be surprised. > Honestly, I don't want to single out CONCURRENT (well, I do a little) > but didn't we just go through this with some new chip set and > shareware. Do you think this is the last of it? All are good illustrations of some tendency toward commercial abuse. However, I think they're only a tendency. As long as we slap them (?hmmm, us?) back into line when it gets heavy-handed, I think we can stay near the thin line where USENET isn't an advertising medium but nonetheless conveys useful TECHNICAL information about new products. Take the "new chip set" issue--I imagine that refers to a rather hyped-up posting from Intel about the 386 in net.arch. The problem was that what was posted was too rich in words like "powerful" and too low in technical content (e.g., it didn't even give a list of the registers/sizes in the new processor). A few people staunchly defended Intel; a few flamed like crazy...but if you average the responses, you come out with something like, "Hey, we'd like to hear about this new processor but could you cut the crap and give us some real info." I suspect that, in the long run, Intel got little advertising value out of that. It may have been slightly negative for them. How much discussion is "just tech talk" and when does it become "advertising". Here's a good example of the dilemma you can find if you're in the commercial world: I'm currently in a discussion of WYSIWYG document presentation/editing in net.text, and Barry has contributed as well. Now, I work for a company that's got a heavy commitment to WYSIWYG, so it would be easy for me to start plugging our products. I'm not about to do that--HOWEVER, my association with this company also means that I've talked and listened and thought a LOT about the issues; I've watched people solving the problems and building real products. I've spent untold hours working with wysiwyg and non-wysiwyg systems. It doesn't make sense that I should hold back from pointing out that some problems can be and have been solved, giving our products as an existence proof. Frankly, it wouldn't be any different if I had done and seen the same work in academia--I would want to contribute what I know to the discussion. I don't want to worry that any time I say something in favor of the way our products work I will get flamed for advertising--but I'll consider carefully when someone expresses an opinion that I'm being biased by my association with NBI. Fair 'nuff? Part of what I'm trying to say in this unreasonably long/rambling article is that netters in the commercial world are aware of the potential for commercial abuse, and I think most of us are sensitive to keeping things in balance. Occasionally you see some hype and some sniping but that's part of keeping the balance. But all of us get enough out of the technical content of USENET that we can't afford to let commercial abuse shut it down. -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Are you making this up as you go along? -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Are you making this up as you go along?