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by James Robertson.
Original Post: How not to make your point
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
This is an odd link for me to post, since it's political - take a look at this snippet of MSNBC from yesterday. Never mind the actual points of the argument, or the politics that underlie them, because none of that matters. What's important is the way O'Donnell tries to argue - loudly yelling over his opponent in an angry, spiteful fashion. Now again - never mind the politics - just look at it as marketing. Imagine being at a trade show, and hearing two technologists carrying on like that. Which one are you more likely to pay any attention to afterwards? To paraphrase something Alan has said to me, "the person who remains calm wins the argument". In marketing terms, always remember that perception is reality.
Now let me relate that to marketing in the technology sector. This is a large part of the reason that Sun was never able to out-market Microsoft in the past - McNealy would always come off as angry and unpleasant, while Gates and Ballmer were simply enthusiastic. It seems that Sun has learned from that - Jonathan Schwartz is never angry on his blog, and tries to make his points with humor. Far more effective than yelling or deploying lawyers, I think.
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