Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Global Development Group

On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 22:54:37 -0500, Philip Warner wrote:
> At 05:48 PM 4/12/2002 -0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
>>Lack of marketing is one of Postgres's major problems.
>
> What are the consequences of the problem?
>

One consequence that probably hits home for everyone here is it makes it
extremely hard to make a living working with postgresql. A quick search on
monster.com gives me 17 jobs mentioning postgresql, with none listed in the
last week. A search on mysql gives me 100 jobs, with 3 filed just today.
I won't even go into the numbers for Oracle, DB2, and M$. We all have to
pay the bills and I think we'd like to do it working with postgresql.

>>Particularly when you compare against similar efforts from MySQL,
>>Oracle, etc.
>
> You could even include Microsoft here - they do a lot of database
> marketing. I am not at all sure the fact that a lot of large companies
> with dubious products engage in extensive marketing is a reason for *us*
> to engage in extensive marketing.
>

You can't win marketshare on technology alone, so unless you think we
don't need to increase our market share, that is reason enough to do more
marketing.

> We already have a substantial following, and our clients have direct
> access to the developers, so any marketing group is pretty irrelevant
> for existing clients. So the only place I can see for a marketing group
> is in building our market share by bringing in new clients.
>

Well, my previous employer uses postgresql, but they were under constant
assault from their clients to use oracle or db2. Technically there was no
reason to switch, but if your choice is switch databases or go out of
business, there really isn't much choice.

In the company I work for now we use at least 4 different
database systems. We could probably switch all of these to postgresql,
but it probably be one heck of a battle to convince people of that. A
simple argument that could be raised is that several of the database
developers use ERWin from computer associates. ERWin's postgresql support
is spotty compared to its support of oracle, and unless there is a
groundswell of demand for better postgresql support, that's not going to
change. If postgresql can gain a larger market share, computer associates
might improve their postgresql support, and we, existing clients that we
are, will be able to use postgresql in more areas.

Marketing is very relevant to existing customers.

> If that is what we want, then fine. But I don't want to see any part of
> the development effort distorted or the existing user base
> inconvenienced in an effort to purely gain that market share. I usually
> associate increased marketing with decreased quality, and I think the
> causality works *both* ways.
>

Aren't most development efforts made simply to gain market share? After
all, I don't think we added schema support to get *less* people to use
postgresql.

Robert Treat