“No really. I understand what you’re saying. But it’s just that – by forcing it down my throat, you’re making me gag and vomit my guts out on your clean, pressed clothes.”
New age therapies, old-age religions, and pyramid business schemes, all sound the same when they’re portrayed as the next best thing to chocolate (itself a debatable topic). For instance, in the computer science world, it’s the new “open-source is best” movement that has me gagging (apart from “iPods are the best”). Again, I have no problems with open-source (or iPods). Being a PhD student myself, and slightly liberal in my beliefs, I tend to believe that knowledge should be freely shared and used by people. But then there are little factors such as; compensation, incentive to innovate more and, of course, accountability, that are businees realities and define individuality in commercial terms. On all these counts open-source doesn’t quite deliver (at least, not just yet). And thats why people still develop and buy proprietary solutions.
Fred Brooks (UNC-Chapel Hill), a great computer science and software engineering pioneer, once said (and wrote a whole damn book about it) regarding software engineering, that there’s “No Silver Bullet”, i.e. there really isn’t a single methodology or paradigm out there that can be considered the end-all solution for everything. Different solutions work in different situations. It doesn’t mean we stop trying to find that “Silver Bullet”. I can see several situations that open source would be perfect. But I can also see several others where they won't, and instead could be potentially disastrous. It’s a nice concept, but its not The Silver Bullet. Not even close.
It’s all fine and dandy to use pseudo-imaginative PowerPoint presentations to present visions of the future. But true visionaries concerned about transforming the world for the global “good” aren’t selling books, software, or feel-good philosophy to you. If they’re pimping something, surely they must have a vested interest in it themselves. At least the smart ones probably do. It makes perfect business sense to convince people (customers and foot soldiers alike) of the need to buy their product. The newly converted foot soldiers and die-hard customers (sometimes they’re the same people) probably realize much later on in life that they were used by the smart, manipulative people up at the top to forward their personal agendas, who then cut and ran when the going got rough.
My limited understanding of marketing and sales is that before you sell something, you need to first find out if there really is a market out there, and if there isn’t, then you’ve got to invest in creating a need for your product. You just have to be skeptical when you’re about to pay a price (whatever it may be) for something new.
Besides, who decides what’s good for you and what’s not? You? Your ancestors? The government? Private business? Priests, temples, religious zealots, new age gurus? Who? Take your pick. Meanwhile, bring that barf-bag along with you when you’re coming round my door to convert me to something new.
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