It seems "Tip of the Week" is now a regular feature of some MV
providers, but not all.

To any DBMS vendor that does not do this...

Doing this is good marketing. It gets your name out on a regular
basis and profiles your product features in a manner which is welcomed
by the audience.

Doing this is good public relations to your existing client base
(another aspect of marketing but internal rather than external).
Marketing doesn't stop after the sale, it's an ongoing process. Just
ask anyone who has migrated away from your platform.

Doing this is good for client retention. Sites that employ
product-specific functionality are not only more in tune with your
brand and vested mentally. While usually unsaid but understood by
all, product-specific code also discourages migrations.

Not doing this is poor marketing, now that your competitors are doing
it. It looks like you don't care, like you don't have or don't want
to expend valuable resources on people who have already purchased your
software. It looks like you don't have anything else to offer. It
looks like you don't have your business act together, especially in
terms of good marketing which is necessary to perpetuate your brand
and provide a platform that people trust will endure over time.

If you are not writing a tip of the week, you should at least consider
another form of periodic technical marketing. Occasional tech notes
are always welcome, more often than once per year (or decade). And
periodic updates to product documentation are of course welcome as
well. People talk about new tech-sites, videos, etc, but these aren't
necessary, and the expense of maintaining these resources could just
dissuade you from doing something more basic like just writing about
something that you know intimately. Use your existing forums as the
medium for distribution, all it costs is a little time.

Not sure what to write about? Just ask your users what features they
do not use. You may find it's just due to poor documentation. Ask
what features they see in competing offerings that they do not see in
yours. They may tell you about a feature that actually is in your
offering. Check your Support logs for FAQs and areas where the
problem is not in the software but how people are trying to use it.
Ask your Support or Engineering people to identify features in your
system that they like, maybe that they created, but which they believe
are under-used. Ask your Sales people what kind of technical
questions they get - the answers should be in your documentation ...
or tech notes. Start an internal competition to see who can crank out
the most tech notes in a month (of minimum size like 500 or 1000
words). Or start a monthly competition amongst users where they
register a topic to write on, and then provide some award that's free
to you but of great value to them (like a single DBMS seat). Edit and
publish the feedback you get from your own user-base. This in itself
is good marketing.

My intent here is really just to get more information into the field
about the products we use every day, to enrich our own experience and
keep us as dedicated to the platform as we are to any specific
product. Not only is this good for us, but it's good for marketing to
an open audience that has never heard of the Pick model.

And application VARs: this all applies to you too.

Have a great day.

Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products
worldwide, and provides related development services
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog
Visit PickWiki.com! Contribute!
http://Twitter.com/TonyGravagno

On 9/15/11 1:37 PM, Tony Gravagno wrote:
Anybody who's not here... raise your hand!

--
frosty

On Sep 15, 2:46*pm, frosty <fros... (AT) bogus (DOT) invalid> wrote:
"What features they do no use."

http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnso...quk6fx4gu/802#

I hope I'm not the first to say it.
I mean... what the? what? Fortran ?
Uh... does anyone in the world still use Fortran ?
Venus ? Mars ?

On Sep 16, 12:29*pm, wjhonson <wjhon... (AT) aol (DOT) com> wrote:
Venus here; nope.. we have no cookies or Fortran.

"wjhonson" <wjhonson (AT) aol (DOT) com> wrote

Some heavy engineering crunchers might still use legacy
libraries written in f77, f90. And linux comes with
precompilers to let you convert your fortran source to
C, then compile that... These are massive and
well-regarded, industry-standard libraries, and free to
download. {google to Linpack or to Lapack }

Isn't it 'the pot calling the kettle black' to decry unfashionably
old but still useful software in a pick newsgroup?

On 9/17/2011 7:48 AM, Frank Winans wrote:
*priceless*

--
-Bruce H

Google to wiki Linpack or to wiki Lapack.

On Sep 18, 3:20*am, "Frank Winans" <fwin... (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:
Oh good, that means Tony will be giving us a technical tip every
week...

There is a lot of Fortran 77 and 90 in the academic world. Bless mixed
source language linkers.

Some of us still write in assembler, albeit that the IDEs for
assembler are a great deal more sophisticated in this day and age.

I agree with the 'Pots and Kettles' argument. How old is Pick/
Databasic in terms of its BNF. Ancient ?

Gee

On 9/21/11 10:16 AM, Godric wrote:
In this context... I'd say yes, mid-1970s is Ancient.

--
frosty

I'm perplexed at where this thread has gone.
The first response from John humorously misrepresented one of my
sentences. The following response by Will misquoted, then referred to
something he himself wrote, then spawned discussion about how silly it
is. All responses since have been related to fortran.

Let's bring this back to something real. Would anyone care to comment
on the actual content of the OP?

Among other points, my note encouraged vendors to find out what
features of their platforms are not being used, and to see if perhaps
better documentation or technotes on those topics would improve their
client experience.

GCI was created a long time ago to address a historical need. If
people don't use GCI for fortran anymore, let's not ridicule the tool,
just don't use that aspect of it and move on. As mentioned in this
thread, people can as easily ridicule the MV DBMS for many reasons,
including reverse polish notation which no one would think to add to a
DBMS today, handling of sequential tape devices, modem dialers, and
antiquated verbs like PRINTRONIX or those for serial port management.

BTW: GCI allows BASIC to interface with C and C++. It's a very
powerful feature. I know very few people who use it today, though
some use it extensively, and I know a lot of sites that could benefit
from it. Did you know that D3 and jBase have the same feature? Any
of you D3 or jBase people use it?

Perhaps Rocket should publish more technotes on GCI to discourage
people in forums from unknowingly laughing at it like it's a relic of
the past. THAT is what my note was about.

T