[Bloat] Motivating commercial entities? tell the sales manager (was: ping loss "considered harmful")

[David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com>]

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On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Bill Ver Steeg (versteb) 
<versteb@cisco.com wrote:
> There are several efforts underway within this particular big vendor to
> address bloat. Are these efforts crash programs to get code out the door as
> fast as humanly possible? No. There are efforts underway, though. These
> things take time?? To be frank, the best way to drive feature
> development/deployment/adoption in most big companies is to have customers
> ask for them.

Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> replied
> Creating understanding and demand has been my nearly f/t project for
> several years now. I hope it is finally starting to work!
>
> However, along the way - in trying to work with everybody in all parts of
> the industry, and to "get along" - I found myself in a deep moral and
> mental hole where I realized I was no longer being true to myself or being
> effective in what I had really set out to do by attempting to create this
> open, shared project, where I had hoped we all would be working together
> for a common goal.

Just a rather specific pointer: it's neither the technical staff nor the 
support team that has the power to report and escalate a bug. /It's the 
sales team/.  If you can elevator-pitch the head of sales for Honeywell* 
with something that will avoid costing him sales, you'll get an informed 
and motivated response from the business.

If you talk to anyone else, they'll need permission from their director 
to even report a bug, and an explicit blessing from a VP to escalate it.

The same is true of most large companies, even if they're not very old.  
If they're market-driven, it the sales and marketing folks who report 
what the market wants.  Techies and CSRs will only be asked /after/ the 
"market" speaks.

--dave
[* Honeywell no longer makes computers, so I can use them as a bad 
example (;-)]

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain


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