Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0

Josh Berkus wrote:
> This release, I think our theme should be corporate involvement.
> Aside from the specific features (which speak for themselves) what's
> news over the last year is the amount of interest and sponsorship
> we've received from various commercial entities, including feature
> sponsors SRA, FJ and Afilias and code contributor Command Prompt, as
> well as our existing sponsors like RH and PGInc and probably others
> I'm forgetting.

I like to think that the theme of any press release announcing a new
software release should be "what does this do for me". (This is more
generally true of anything you write.) We have plenty of new features
that you can map to prominent terms such as flexibility, performance,
safety, ease of administration, etc. while still staying on topic and
conveying actual information to the public. The mention of corporate
involvement is going to make everyone yawn. It will be of brief
interest to those so-called market analysts, but it will do absolutely
nothing for our users and potential users.

If you want to make points about business momentum, you can do that in
separate activities. Forcing this in the release announcement press
release can lead to several impressions:

"Oh, there are so few interesting features in this release, they need to
fill the space with their sponsors."

"Oh, they're so desperate to show off their business momentum, they need
to mention three companies I've never heard of."

"Oh, my beloved PostgreSQL is being taken over by evil corporations."

Who cares about business momentum anyway? Tell me about feature
momentum.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/