Re: Certification Available +Pronounce

On Tuesday 30 August 2005 13:46, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:37:37PM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:
> > The interesting thing about this conversation is that what this project
> > really needs is a way to seed the market with enthusiastic product
> > adoptors.
>
> Well, you want _competent_ enthusiastic product adopters, right? I
> mean, the reason many of the crappy certifications work so well is
> because Bob Pointyhair and Marie Cheveuxpointus are setting up their
> New Important Services Organisation des Services Importants Nouvaux
> (NISOSIN), and they hire a bunch of twerps who have certification.
>

Gee, I don't know. It doesn't seem to stop people from setting up crappy
pre-2000 era functionality email systems with thier "certified exchange
administrator".

> This is the real problem David was talking about: because we don't
> have a whole service arm of the company (we don't have a company!)
> that is here to rescue customers who already have incompetent staff,
> we don't have a way to convince those potential users that our
> software doesn't suck (when they use it wrong). My boss was just
> yesterday telling me of a case he recently heard of in this vein:
> some folks he knows couldn't make Postgres work, so they went and
> used something else. They believe you Can't Do That With Postgres,
> even though what they really should have concluded is probably one of
> Don't Do That or you Can't Do That With Those Staff.
>

This anecdote seems to contradict itself since there *are* a lot of services
companies running around (which I am guessing they didn't try to make use
of). The other question is does having a lot of well trained people in the
market get people to use PostgreSQL? At some point it would, but I don't
think it does now...I certainly don't think it would have help the folks in
your example. I bet we'd be better off with a "certified postgresql user"
setup where people can easily get certified as long as they know the basics
of postgresql (command line tools, 10 most important conf settings,
familiarity with some anciallry tools like slony, pgadmin, ppa, pqa or some
such). Basically I'm not sure we've conquerued the "we don't use postgres
cause nobody uses it" excuse, and a simple certification might help do that.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL