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Trust Is at the Core of Software Marketing

151 points by gk1 7y ago

have_faith 7y ago
> Open source companies build trust by sharing the entirety of their codebase to the public This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers. I can see why it would be seen as trust building, but I don't think it builds as much trust as developers would like to believe. Not an argument against open source at all, just interesting to think about how you sell open source as a feature to an end user.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  Also trust cuts both ways. Ultimately if you produce bloated, frustrating bug-ridden software, sharing the source online probably isn't going to help your case. There's a significant collection of software that I didn't trust out of the gate, and I now trust a lot less after reading the source (Apache projects, I'm looking at you).
- pytester 7y ago
  >This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers. Trust is highly transitive for highly technical developer focused products though. The core of stripe's trust, even among non technical decision makers, is down to their killer APIs and docs.
rusticpenn 7y ago
Google seems to "survive" after becoming so untrustworthy ( in shutting down tools)
- SQueeeeeL 7y ago
  Yeah, trust is just a way to break into the market. Sorta like the old saying "it takes a poor genius to become rich and a rich idiot to become poor"
omarhaneef 7y ago
"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner, Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies diligence software products directly and through surveys. This is the reason analyst relations are so important. Presence on the magic quadrant confers trustworthiness." Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective.
- otoburb 7y ago
  >>Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? Enterprise purchasing stakeholders value these endorsements to the point that they would be more likely to take a meeting with a vendor positioned in Gartner's magic quadrant or covered favourably in Forrester's Wave reports. This does not mean that purchasing teams will solely base their decisions on these types of reports, but it certainly can (and often does) positively influence your funnel momentum for a particular year. After securing one or several meetings with various stakeholders in an organization, you'll then have to do the rest of the legwork in your standard sales cycle to close the deal (e.g. demos, tender bid responses, deployments, onerous commercial negotiations, etc).
- wolco 7y ago
  I've seen it in action. The internal person pushing the product using includes a slide during presentations and uses it as the base to compare products. Purchasing decisions are made later but it is used to narrow the field.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  I've got some experience on both sides of the fence -- working with people who made enterprise purchasing decisions, and working on devices aimed at them. It's not that much experience, mind you, so it's not invulnerable to sampling bias. Take it with a grain of salt. In my experience, these things work largely as a barrier of entry thing. No one will buy something just because Gartner endorsed it, unless they're really clueless, or trying to sabotage their companies while maintaining plausible deniability. However, getting this kind of endorsement requires some level of organizational stability, business connections and money. The fact that you have one is an indication that people can do business with you without jeopardizing their bonuses. That won't convince anyone to make the purchase, but it will get you through the door. The endorsements and studies themselves don't mean much. I personally know of at least one such study that was highly effective, and cost an unspeakable amount of money to conduct and market, and was absolutely bollocks. It showed that one company's implementation of a failsafe feature was "at least as efficient" as the industry standard. It was a 20-page-ish whitepaper, with graphs and benchmarks and whatnot. What it didn't even test for, let alone mention, was that exposing that feature to the kind of conditions it was meant to protect against caused it to fail, and then crash the whole system.
techpop10 7y ago
"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner, Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies diligence software products directly and through surveys. This is the reason analyst relations are so important. Presence on the magic quadrant confers trustworthiness." Strongly disagree on this point. With the exception of 451 Research, the major analyst firms do not share any of their research methodologies. Did they interview/research 10 orgs or 1,000? You don't know. The biases of the research analysts is also suspect. At Gartner, many of their analysts haven't actually used the software they are covering. As a consequence, we have no idea about the depth of their research at all. The role of these analysts is to give C-level executives a "cover your a$$" excuse if things go wrong with the software. From my experience, most technical level decision makers rely more on their peers to develop trust than on analysts.
- pidg 7y ago
  Everything is ass-covering. The "trust" tech marketing builds is to say "I trust these guys won't lose me my job", not "I trust their software works exactly as advertised".
CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
If it was true that trust is enough to market software, there would be much more investment in application security by the long tail of startups, consultancies, and webdev "shops". What I've found over the years is that most people who sell software think of security as a value-add. At best, it's something to bill enterprise customers for. At worst, it's a cost center that will only be invested in if a big paying customer asks for it explicitly, and not a moment sooner. [1] For background: I spent years pushing the PHP ecosystem forward in cryptography and security. I published a lot of open source libraries [2], cleaned up a lot of StackOverflow answers [3], and had a lot of discussions with small and medium businesses about security improvements that ultimately went nowhere because they couldn't find budget for security. I don't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at the core" of software marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can obviate trust in this context. (I do believe that software ought to be more trustworthy, and society should reward companies that act with integrity. But at the end of the day, that's not my call to make.) [1]: https://sso.tax https://sso.tax [2]: https://github.com/paragonie https://github.com/paragonie [3]: https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-make-insecure-php-software-thing-past https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-make-i...
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I don't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at the core" of software marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can obviate trust in this context. What you're seeing is companies that ignore security and trust at their own peril. There are plenty of them, and the vast majority of startups, that don't realize how important trust and security is to large customers. Then they wonder why they can't get their foot in the door at certain companies. The place I work for runs every software purchase through a security committee. For that reason, we tend to go with the big brands that take security seriously. But it's not exclusively big brands. I worked on a particular project that needed a particular type of software. None of the big brands had anything similar. I put together a list of five options and sent it over to the people who actually get to make the decisions. All five options were small developers (fewer than 50 employees). Only two of those five bothered to respond to the initial inquiries from our security people. Of the two that responded, only one provided answers to the follow-up questions. Guess which one got a ~$250K purchase order the next month.
yodon 7y ago
Given the data and evidence based posts the OP is known for, this post feels disappointingly light and anecdotal.
- ttunguz 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. What data would help with the argument?
  - yodon 7y ago
    > We won’t buy from people or companies we don’t trust. The same is true in software. That reads like a sensible statement, but I'm not sure it's true or if it's true I'm not sure how the scale factors fit in. Just raising the obvious counter-example, Facebook is pretty wildly distrusted, and yet is widely used by people who distrust it. Did they "purchase" FB? Not literally, but they certainly engage with it in ways similar to purchasing and pay for it with ad viewing. As to the data question, I'd think the best approach would involve looking for explicit measures of trust (eg surveys) and seeing how those map to revenue growth or subscriber growth for software companies. The brand strength you called out may be relevant as a proxy for trust, but I think that's assuming the thesis to be true and then proving it to be true by saying strong brands have strong sales numbers therefore trust is the key to sales (without ever proving trust is key to software brand strength). Another approach might be to look at sales numbers following data leak incidents, but I think that's more complex because these days those announcements are so prevalent they may not stay in the news cycle long enough to matter (which arguably is itself a sign trust is not as key a differentiator as one would expect). As one more thought, I'd expect b2b software purchase decisions to have a steeper dependence on trust than b2c, but that's just a guess. Your thesis is certainly an important one to explore, and I think all of us hope it's true because an economic incentive like this is a powerful force encouraging companies to treat our data in a trustworthy manner.
grammarxcore 7y ago
I'm not sure what the takeaways from this article were. I feel like the incredibly short article was more a tautological executive summary of code axioms.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Brand value can be trust, but it can also mean other things, like dynamism or creativity. Building a brand is a long, disciplined process. I'm in the very early stages of building a personal brand. I don't expect it to have much to show for itself for another year or two. Part of that, is being careful and thoughtful about what I post in public forums, whether online, or in-person. I have made it a point to hold myself accountable for what I post. If you look at my HN handle, you will see that I link to my corporate Web sites and Stack Overflow story. I may come across as pedantic and "stuffy," but I'm done with damaging my personal brand. Everything I do is meant as a part of brand-building. I have had trust as part of my personal brand for a couple of decades. I was a senior engineering manager for a very conservative Japanese company. You don't get to stay long in those types of positions without a demonstrable degree of personal integrity.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
"Slimy sales practices provokes distrust" How many times have you been promised the world by a sales person and then you speak with an engineer and get a whole different story? I've learned to always speak with an engineer and find the manager of an existing customer. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so much.
- thrav 7y ago
  Being on the other side, there are plenty of times that I have to tell the customer, “this world is only going to happen if you make the proper investment in setting this up specific to your needs...” and then they complain when an already overworked employee they threw it over the fence to can’t make it sing. Good enterprise software is almost never one size fits all, and there is responsibility on both sides to end up with something great.
  - bhandziuk 7y ago
    Right, enterprise software is usually relying on the end user to program everything but instead of programming in C#/Javascript they're programming in Salesforce (or whatever)
    - thrav 7y ago
      I wouldn’t say everything. The whole point is not to rebuild security, and infra, and the data store, etc. etc. The first start up I worked for built a piece of software that was adopted by large enterprises in regulated industries with 3 engineers, because they got to piggyback off of the Salesforce foundation. It’s just a different flavor of abstraction.
  - ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
    That's an honest answer I would appreciate and understand, much preferred over "Yes, but actually no"
pluc 7y ago
Trust and marketing never belong in the same sentence. Marketing is the art of inconsequential "pushing of the truth" and frivolous claims. It's the art of shoving a sub-par product in your face over a relevant product.
- gk1 7y ago
  > Marketing is the art of inconsequential "pushing of the truth" What would you call it when someone, say, the product creator, speaks the truth about a product to get the word out? That would fall under "marketing." "Marketing" is as general a term as "programming." There are all sorts of bad things accomplished with programming, but I think you'd agree that generalizing all of "programming" as something negative would be ridiculous.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    No, it's not. Marketing as a concept is totally divorced from whether or not its message is truthful because marketing doesn't measure anything. It's propaganda, whether or not the audience understands that or whether the creator is being honest. The audience has to effectively use a side-channel to figure out if a piece of marketing accurately reflects the product. Often times it doesn't, or at least not completely, because if you don't lie or exaggerate to some extent, your product will lose out to the competitor who makes bolder claims, uses brighter colors, and is purposefully less specific in their message. The best that marketing can do to convey trust is to use social proof. After all, if everyone is using Brand X, it must be good, right? Of course, social proof can be faked, exaggerated, or bought with a lot of money, as is commonly done.
    - gk1 7y ago
      I think you're talking about "advertising," which is != "marketing." To continue with my analogy, it's like saying "spam is bad, therefore all email is bad, and email is created by programming, therefore all programming is bad."
- aantix 7y ago
  Your assessment of “marketing” which appears to encompass all products ever spoken of, is so general, it’s useless. Not a single product that was spoken about had a genuine impact on the buyer? Not a single product actually worked as advertised?
unlinked_dll 7y ago
I was once at an audio manufacturer that will be coming up on the 100th anniversary in a few years. I distinctly remember the presentation given to all of us where it was hammered home that the company was optimized for preserving and expanding the brand. For example, they would avoid changing materials/tooling for their products that have been manufactured for decades without rigorous testing that showed it improved the product or unless supply chain issues out of their control forced them to (which my understanding was rare, because they engineered their supply chain to avoid it). Some of this is pragmatic. It takes a century to build a brand and a day to kill it. And in that industry, brand loyalty is as important as specs. But much more of it is genuine care for their products and customers - they hired people who gave a shit, and the culture wasn't one where a penny pinching decision that harmed quality would have been made, let alone tolerated. My point is this - a brand with "trust" as a core value isn't derived just from transparency, sharing code, auditing and communication. It's built by the people that work on those products, sell them, and make decisions about the product roadmap. Much the way that software architecture reflects organizational architecture, brand value reflects culture and values of the people that work on it.
- pif 7y ago
  > brand value reflects culture and values of the people that work on it. It also reflects the priorities of their customers: those who can only ask for "cheaper" will not get anything else than "cheaper".
  - beamatronic 7y ago
    There could be such a thing as cheaper in a specific way. If I buy a screwdriver from Harbor freight, I know exactly what I am getting. My only surprise would be to the upside. And likewise if I buy something from snap on.
- beamatronic 7y ago
  The way that branding is supposed to work, everyone’s interests are aligned, when the product delivers on what is promised. It helps consumers and it helps the brand.
gartneranalyst 7y ago
A Gartner analyst here. AMA.
- chishaku 7y ago
  Can you describe the breadth and depth of technical experience that a typical analyst might have?
  - gartneranalyst 7y ago
    This varies. Most deeply technical Gartner analysts write deeply technical research aimed at technical roles. Most business focused Gartner analysts are not developers, but understand the technical merits of products and services. Most of this research is aimed at a non-technical audience.
- gk1 7y ago
  Hi gartneranalyst :) When your firm starts using new category terms like DevSecOps and AIOps, how much of that is due to Gartner trying to create new categories (so that you could dominate the analysis of said category) versus relaying actual terms you're hearing in the market?
  - gartneranalyst 7y ago
    When we either create or advance terms that we're hearing it's always to provide clarity to the market.
- notlukesky 7y ago
  What are the steps to become a cool vendor first and to be listed in the Magic Quadrant?
  - gartneranalyst 7y ago
    You should review the Inclusion Criteria for the Magic Quadrant in which you are interested in participating. That criteria sets the bar for participation. There are no specific "steps" to be part of a Cool Vendors document. Something you should consider doing though is conducting a "vendor briefing" with the analysts who may be interested in your offering so that they are aware of your company, etc.
freepor 7y ago
You cannot maximize near term profits and long term customer trust. And the financing systems of the modern economy are set up for near term profits. Thus you cannot do right by your customers unless you are financed outside of the finance industry (bootstrapping, family business, rich dude).
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  If profit is orthogonal to a core value of the brand, then that value is not important to the market. That's just knowing your customers. As well, near term profit and long term brand goals are never decoupled. You don't one day decide "our brand is X" but "our brand will be X" and you need to do Y and Z today and every day following to build up to X. And I firmly reject the idea that near-term profit is disjoint from long-term consumer trust, at least for professional products and tooling. If they don't trust you not to screw them today or tomorrow, they won't pay you. I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because no one trusts them at all.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    > I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because no one trusts them at all. I'm not sure about this. Google at least was not broadly considered untrustworthy for the first half or more of its existence. Indeed, the key reason that they're considered untrustworthy is the decisions they've made in support of making their money from advertising.
    - samatman 7y ago
      I think it's a little more subtle than that. Google in the late Noughties was awash in advertising money and inculcated a culture of 'internal startups', where they would offer services (Wave, Reader, Google+) without much of an eye toward profit. Eventually, higher-ups would notice that these services were costing money, and shut them down. Today you'd be a fool to invest in the long-term stability of a Google service that doesn't have an obvious tie to the advertising firehose, because they've yet to figure out how to make money any other way.

151 points by gk1 7y ago

> Open source companies build trust by sharing the entirety of their codebase to the public This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers. I can see why it would be seen as trust building, but I don't think it builds as much trust as developers would like to believe. Not an argument against open source at all, just interesting to think about how you sell open source as a feature to an end user.

xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
Also trust cuts both ways. Ultimately if you produce bloated, frustrating bug-ridden software, sharing the source online probably isn't going to help your case. There's a significant collection of software that I didn't trust out of the gate, and I now trust a lot less after reading the source (Apache projects, I'm looking at you).
pytester 7y ago
>This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers. Trust is highly transitive for highly technical developer focused products though. The core of stripe's trust, even among non technical decision makers, is down to their killer APIs and docs.

rusticpenn 7y ago

Google seems to "survive" after becoming so untrustworthy ( in shutting down tools)

SQueeeeeL 7y ago
Yeah, trust is just a way to break into the market. Sorta like the old saying "it takes a poor genius to become rich and a rich idiot to become poor"

omarhaneef 7y ago

otoburb 7y ago
>>Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? Enterprise purchasing stakeholders value these endorsements to the point that they would be more likely to take a meeting with a vendor positioned in Gartner's magic quadrant or covered favourably in Forrester's Wave reports. This does not mean that purchasing teams will solely base their decisions on these types of reports, but it certainly can (and often does) positively influence your funnel momentum for a particular year. After securing one or several meetings with various stakeholders in an organization, you'll then have to do the rest of the legwork in your standard sales cycle to close the deal (e.g. demos, tender bid responses, deployments, onerous commercial negotiations, etc).
wolco 7y ago
I've seen it in action. The internal person pushing the product using includes a slide during presentations and uses it as the base to compare products. Purchasing decisions are made later but it is used to narrow the field.
alxlaz 7y ago
I've got some experience on both sides of the fence -- working with people who made enterprise purchasing decisions, and working on devices aimed at them. It's not that much experience, mind you, so it's not invulnerable to sampling bias. Take it with a grain of salt. In my experience, these things work largely as a barrier of entry thing. No one will buy something just because Gartner endorsed it, unless they're really clueless, or trying to sabotage their companies while maintaining plausible deniability. However, getting this kind of endorsement requires some level of organizational stability, business connections and money. The fact that you have one is an indication that people can do business with you without jeopardizing their bonuses. That won't convince anyone to make the purchase, but it will get you through the door. The endorsements and studies themselves don't mean much. I personally know of at least one such study that was highly effective, and cost an unspeakable amount of money to conduct and market, and was absolutely bollocks. It showed that one company's implementation of a failsafe feature was "at least as efficient" as the industry standard. It was a 20-page-ish whitepaper, with graphs and benchmarks and whatnot. What it didn't even test for, let alone mention, was that exposing that feature to the kind of conditions it was meant to protect against caused it to fail, and then crash the whole system.

techpop10 7y ago

"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner, Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies diligence software products directly and through surveys. This is the reason analyst relations are so important. Presence on the magic quadrant confers trustworthiness." Strongly disagree on this point. With the exception of 451 Research, the major analyst firms do not share any of their research methodologies. Did they interview/research 10 orgs or 1,000? You don't know. The biases of the research analysts is also suspect. At Gartner, many of their analysts haven't actually used the software they are covering. As a consequence, we have no idea about the depth of their research at all. The role of these analysts is to give C-level executives a "cover your a$$" excuse if things go wrong with the software. From my experience, most technical level decision makers rely more on their peers to develop trust than on analysts.

pidg 7y ago
Everything is ass-covering. The "trust" tech marketing builds is to say "I trust these guys won't lose me my job", not "I trust their software works exactly as advertised".

CiPHPerCoder 7y ago

If it was true that trust is enough to market software, there would be much more investment in application security by the long tail of startups, consultancies, and webdev "shops". What I've found over the years is that most people who sell software think of security as a value-add. At best, it's something to bill enterprise customers for. At worst, it's a cost center that will only be invested in if a big paying customer asks for it explicitly, and not a moment sooner. [1] For background: I spent years pushing the PHP ecosystem forward in cryptography and security. I published a lot of open source libraries [2], cleaned up a lot of StackOverflow answers [3], and had a lot of discussions with small and medium businesses about security improvements that ultimately went nowhere because they couldn't find budget for security. I don't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at the core" of software marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can obviate trust in this context. (I do believe that software ought to be more trustworthy, and society should reward companies that act with integrity. But at the end of the day, that's not my call to make.) [1]: https://sso.tax https://sso.tax [2]: https://github.com/paragonie https://github.com/paragonie [3]: https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-make-insecure-php-software-thing-past https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-make-i...

reaperducer 7y ago
I don't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at the core" of software marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can obviate trust in this context. What you're seeing is companies that ignore security and trust at their own peril. There are plenty of them, and the vast majority of startups, that don't realize how important trust and security is to large customers. Then they wonder why they can't get their foot in the door at certain companies. The place I work for runs every software purchase through a security committee. For that reason, we tend to go with the big brands that take security seriously. But it's not exclusively big brands. I worked on a particular project that needed a particular type of software. None of the big brands had anything similar. I put together a list of five options and sent it over to the people who actually get to make the decisions. All five options were small developers (fewer than 50 employees). Only two of those five bothered to respond to the initial inquiries from our security people. Of the two that responded, only one provided answers to the follow-up questions. Guess which one got a ~$250K purchase order the next month.

yodon 7y ago

Given the data and evidence based posts the OP is known for, this post feels disappointingly light and anecdotal.

ttunguz 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback. What data would help with the argument?
- yodon 7y ago
  > We won’t buy from people or companies we don’t trust. The same is true in software. That reads like a sensible statement, but I'm not sure it's true or if it's true I'm not sure how the scale factors fit in. Just raising the obvious counter-example, Facebook is pretty wildly distrusted, and yet is widely used by people who distrust it. Did they "purchase" FB? Not literally, but they certainly engage with it in ways similar to purchasing and pay for it with ad viewing. As to the data question, I'd think the best approach would involve looking for explicit measures of trust (eg surveys) and seeing how those map to revenue growth or subscriber growth for software companies. The brand strength you called out may be relevant as a proxy for trust, but I think that's assuming the thesis to be true and then proving it to be true by saying strong brands have strong sales numbers therefore trust is the key to sales (without ever proving trust is key to software brand strength). Another approach might be to look at sales numbers following data leak incidents, but I think that's more complex because these days those announcements are so prevalent they may not stay in the news cycle long enough to matter (which arguably is itself a sign trust is not as key a differentiator as one would expect). As one more thought, I'd expect b2b software purchase decisions to have a steeper dependence on trust than b2c, but that's just a guess. Your thesis is certainly an important one to explore, and I think all of us hope it's true because an economic incentive like this is a powerful force encouraging companies to treat our data in a trustworthy manner.

grammarxcore 7y ago

I'm not sure what the takeaways from this article were. I feel like the incredibly short article was more a tautological executive summary of code axioms.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Brand value can be trust, but it can also mean other things, like dynamism or creativity. Building a brand is a long, disciplined process. I'm in the very early stages of building a personal brand. I don't expect it to have much to show for itself for another year or two. Part of that, is being careful and thoughtful about what I post in public forums, whether online, or in-person. I have made it a point to hold myself accountable for what I post. If you look at my HN handle, you will see that I link to my corporate Web sites and Stack Overflow story. I may come across as pedantic and "stuffy," but I'm done with damaging my personal brand. Everything I do is meant as a part of brand-building. I have had trust as part of my personal brand for a couple of decades. I was a senior engineering manager for a very conservative Japanese company. You don't get to stay long in those types of positions without a demonstrable degree of personal integrity.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

"Slimy sales practices provokes distrust" How many times have you been promised the world by a sales person and then you speak with an engineer and get a whole different story? I've learned to always speak with an engineer and find the manager of an existing customer. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so much.

thrav 7y ago
Being on the other side, there are plenty of times that I have to tell the customer, “this world is only going to happen if you make the proper investment in setting this up specific to your needs...” and then they complain when an already overworked employee they threw it over the fence to can’t make it sing. Good enterprise software is almost never one size fits all, and there is responsibility on both sides to end up with something great.
- bhandziuk 7y ago
  Right, enterprise software is usually relying on the end user to program everything but instead of programming in C#/Javascript they're programming in Salesforce (or whatever)
  - thrav 7y ago
    I wouldn’t say everything. The whole point is not to rebuild security, and infra, and the data store, etc. etc. The first start up I worked for built a piece of software that was adopted by large enterprises in regulated industries with 3 engineers, because they got to piggyback off of the Salesforce foundation. It’s just a different flavor of abstraction.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  That's an honest answer I would appreciate and understand, much preferred over "Yes, but actually no"

pluc 7y ago

Trust and marketing never belong in the same sentence. Marketing is the art of inconsequential "pushing of the truth" and frivolous claims. It's the art of shoving a sub-par product in your face over a relevant product.

gk1 7y ago
> Marketing is the art of inconsequential "pushing of the truth" What would you call it when someone, say, the product creator, speaks the truth about a product to get the word out? That would fall under "marketing." "Marketing" is as general a term as "programming." There are all sorts of bad things accomplished with programming, but I think you'd agree that generalizing all of "programming" as something negative would be ridiculous.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  No, it's not. Marketing as a concept is totally divorced from whether or not its message is truthful because marketing doesn't measure anything. It's propaganda, whether or not the audience understands that or whether the creator is being honest. The audience has to effectively use a side-channel to figure out if a piece of marketing accurately reflects the product. Often times it doesn't, or at least not completely, because if you don't lie or exaggerate to some extent, your product will lose out to the competitor who makes bolder claims, uses brighter colors, and is purposefully less specific in their message. The best that marketing can do to convey trust is to use social proof. After all, if everyone is using Brand X, it must be good, right? Of course, social proof can be faked, exaggerated, or bought with a lot of money, as is commonly done.
  - gk1 7y ago
    I think you're talking about "advertising," which is != "marketing." To continue with my analogy, it's like saying "spam is bad, therefore all email is bad, and email is created by programming, therefore all programming is bad."
aantix 7y ago
Your assessment of “marketing” which appears to encompass all products ever spoken of, is so general, it’s useless. Not a single product that was spoken about had a genuine impact on the buyer? Not a single product actually worked as advertised?

unlinked_dll 7y ago

I was once at an audio manufacturer that will be coming up on the 100th anniversary in a few years. I distinctly remember the presentation given to all of us where it was hammered home that the company was optimized for preserving and expanding the brand. For example, they would avoid changing materials/tooling for their products that have been manufactured for decades without rigorous testing that showed it improved the product or unless supply chain issues out of their control forced them to (which my understanding was rare, because they engineered their supply chain to avoid it). Some of this is pragmatic. It takes a century to build a brand and a day to kill it. And in that industry, brand loyalty is as important as specs. But much more of it is genuine care for their products and customers - they hired people who gave a shit, and the culture wasn't one where a penny pinching decision that harmed quality would have been made, let alone tolerated. My point is this - a brand with "trust" as a core value isn't derived just from transparency, sharing code, auditing and communication. It's built by the people that work on those products, sell them, and make decisions about the product roadmap. Much the way that software architecture reflects organizational architecture, brand value reflects culture and values of the people that work on it.

pif 7y ago
> brand value reflects culture and values of the people that work on it. It also reflects the priorities of their customers: those who can only ask for "cheaper" will not get anything else than "cheaper".
- beamatronic 7y ago
  There could be such a thing as cheaper in a specific way. If I buy a screwdriver from Harbor freight, I know exactly what I am getting. My only surprise would be to the upside. And likewise if I buy something from snap on.
beamatronic 7y ago
The way that branding is supposed to work, everyone’s interests are aligned, when the product delivers on what is promised. It helps consumers and it helps the brand.

gartneranalyst 7y ago

A Gartner analyst here. AMA.

chishaku 7y ago
Can you describe the breadth and depth of technical experience that a typical analyst might have?
- gartneranalyst 7y ago
  This varies. Most deeply technical Gartner analysts write deeply technical research aimed at technical roles. Most business focused Gartner analysts are not developers, but understand the technical merits of products and services. Most of this research is aimed at a non-technical audience.
gk1 7y ago
Hi gartneranalyst :) When your firm starts using new category terms like DevSecOps and AIOps, how much of that is due to Gartner trying to create new categories (so that you could dominate the analysis of said category) versus relaying actual terms you're hearing in the market?
- gartneranalyst 7y ago
  When we either create or advance terms that we're hearing it's always to provide clarity to the market.
notlukesky 7y ago
What are the steps to become a cool vendor first and to be listed in the Magic Quadrant?
- gartneranalyst 7y ago
  You should review the Inclusion Criteria for the Magic Quadrant in which you are interested in participating. That criteria sets the bar for participation. There are no specific "steps" to be part of a Cool Vendors document. Something you should consider doing though is conducting a "vendor briefing" with the analysts who may be interested in your offering so that they are aware of your company, etc.

freepor 7y ago

You cannot maximize near term profits and long term customer trust. And the financing systems of the modern economy are set up for near term profits. Thus you cannot do right by your customers unless you are financed outside of the finance industry (bootstrapping, family business, rich dude).

unlinked_dll 7y ago
If profit is orthogonal to a core value of the brand, then that value is not important to the market. That's just knowing your customers. As well, near term profit and long term brand goals are never decoupled. You don't one day decide "our brand is X" but "our brand will be X" and you need to do Y and Z today and every day following to build up to X. And I firmly reject the idea that near-term profit is disjoint from long-term consumer trust, at least for professional products and tooling. If they don't trust you not to screw them today or tomorrow, they won't pay you. I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because no one trusts them at all.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  > I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because no one trusts them at all. I'm not sure about this. Google at least was not broadly considered untrustworthy for the first half or more of its existence. Indeed, the key reason that they're considered untrustworthy is the decisions they've made in support of making their money from advertising.
  - samatman 7y ago
    I think it's a little more subtle than that. Google in the late Noughties was awash in advertising money and inculcated a culture of 'internal startups', where they would offer services (Wave, Reader, Google+) without much of an eye toward profit. Eventually, higher-ups would notice that these services were costing money, and shut them down. Today you'd be a fool to invest in the long-term stability of a Google service that doesn't have an obvious tie to the advertising firehose, because they've yet to figure out how to make money any other way.