[Zope] A Tale from IBM land...

[Oliver Bleutgen]

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 02:59:27PM +0200, Peter Bengtsson wrote:
>> > Finally, on buzzwords, I'd say go easy on Python. It scares
>> > people. Say Perl, say XML, say any other ML. Who cares what
>> > BroadVision is written in? Why should we care with Zope?
>> > (someone is going to hate that).
>> > ....Mike
>>
>> I disagree.
>> Zope is very different from the others in this respect.
>> Python is such a big part of Zope. You could almost say: "a bunch or
>> prepared classes and libraries written in Python, and it even has a HTML
>> end
>> to it. The collection of these frameworks is called ZOPE"
>> And Python is definitly something to be proud of these days.

> depends on where your marketing focus is. if you're pitching the
> technical staff, the fact that zope is a python application _can_
> be a big plus, if you're pitching the non-technical decision
> makers (see my earlier posts) then talking python _can_ muddy the
> waters. the suits are buying solutions, not programming languages
> so the fact that zope is a python 'killer app' means you have to
> sell not only zope as a solution, but now python as well, double
> the sales effort...

I hope you people don't mind if I repeat myself, but
the above is really the point.
Talking python, OOP, TAL, ZPT, CMF, zclasses and whatnot
is very often _not_ a good idea with decision makers as a 
target.

Go to
http://www.microsoft.com/cmserver/

(btw. does anybody know this product?, on a quick glance, 
it seems to be something like Zope+CMF+ZIEMethod.)

Take the tour,
http://www.microsoft.com/cmserver/evaluation/tour.htm

What we see there is exactly what I meant my previous
lengthy mail.
_No_ technical information, but some small flash animations
of cursors doing drag&drop, pictures of
nice people who look like they really love their life now
that they can use this product.

Andy McKay wrote about the art of presenting zope (to a LUG!):

"I would recommend just showing a lot of Zope and an application. I made the
mistake recently of talking too much and only having 5 mins to show stuff. I
installed Squishdot from a tar file, right there and then and compared it
too installing Slashcode. That impressed people alot more than the waffle I
did."

This is true even more if not talking to linuxheads. 
People need pictures they can understand.

cheers,
oliver