Comments on: 5 Reasons You're Not Earning More

By: tod

tod — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:01:28 +0000

I agree, and I thank you for pointing it out.

By: Dana H.

Dana H. — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:49:44 +0000

I don’t disagree with your examples. I just think the characterization “driven purely by marketing” is inaccurate, or at least incomplete. (I’d accept “purely driven by irrational or short-term marketing considerations.”)

Also a developer’s “cool toy” (or cool feature) may indeed be ephemeral junk if it doesn’t do anything for the customer and/or destabilizes the product. Alan Cooper critiques engineer-driven development in “The Inmates are Running the Asylum,” which I recommend, despite some flaws.

It’s funny that you mention TurboTax, as that product is causing me much grief lately. It gives me a blue screen crash whenever it attempts to bring up a certain dialog. I installed it on another machine and observed that the dialog is far more elaborate than it needs to be, and is probably calling some obscure, buggy API function on my graphics card that results in the crash. Not sure whether to blame development, QA, or marketing for that one — probably all of them to some extent.

By: tod

tod — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:03:12 +0000

I really appreciate your comment, Dana. I realize that I should have been more clear. I agree that marketing when done rationally is a good thing; I engage in it myself. I don’t want to smear the act of marketing itself. I’m irked by the kind that slavishly appeals to stupidity or low values. For example, I hate the newspaper ads that try to sell “Amish” space heaters as though they are something extremely special being doled out by what seems to be a government entity. Maybe it’s not inherently dishonest — you pay the money, you get the product — but the way they try to sell it, by trying to fool people or by appealing to their sense of entitlement, is disgusting.

In the software world, how about those horrible toolbars and other kinds of adware / spyware / malware (almost all for Windows) that trick the user into installing them and then never go away. Or, the fact that TurboTax takes a long time calculating your taxes to make it seem like it’s doing something valuable, rather than returning the result instantly. Who wants to be the developer who was told by a bad marketer to write a junky toolbar or cripple a program to make it seem more valuable? That is the kind of marketing driven junk that I object to. Cool toys != ephemeral junk.

By: Dana H.

Dana H. — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:30:53 +0000

I agree with the theme of your article, but…

“…ephemeral junk driven purely by marketing.”

Please don’t smear marketing this way. Rational marketing is a legitimate and valuable pursuit, which seeks to (1) determine what potential customers need; (2) get the firm to develop products that meet these needs; and (3) let customers know that the product exists and indeed meets their needs.

Specifically in the realm of software, “ephemeral junk” is at least as likely to be created by a developer building something solely because he thinks it’s cool (irrespective of market needs) as it is by a developer following a marketeer’s guidance.

(Note: I’m a developer, not a marketeer. But I understand and appreciate the value of division of labor in general and of marketing in particular.)