13 ms·

The Redhat of Drupal

163 points by jdorfman 14y ago

geerlingguy 14y ago
Sounds like someone on the sales team wasn't informed about Wordpress. The relationship between the WP and Drupal communities is typically very amicable.
- malachismith 14y ago
  "wasn't informed"?!?!?! Umm... this is a hiring fail. You shouldn't have to be informed about the dominant player in your market.
josh2600 14y ago
I don't know. Clearly the sales guy didn't do any research and it's funny, but I think less of Matt for not hiding the gentlemen's information. Yes it's foolish to cold email someone like that but it seems petty and unnecessary to put this person "on blast" as it were.
- qeorge 14y ago
  I have the world's tiniest violin available for spammers who don't want their email addresses published. I especially loved this bit: "I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. " What a bold faced lie! Obviously he didn't spend even 2 seconds researching anything related to Automattic. Acquia harvested Matt's information and spammed him, and they deserve to be called out.
  - josh2600 14y ago
    That's still a person who has to make a living. He could've made the point just as well while omitting personal information. The only value the identity adds is the potential for harassment (not insinuating that this is Matt's intention, only that this is the likely outcome of personal information on the internet in this day and age). I have no problem with calling out the company. I'd have no problem with the first name even. But the phone number and last name are personally identifying and unnecessarily endanger the representative.
    - Domenic_S 14y ago
      "Unnecessarily endanger the representative"? He didn't set a puppy on fire and post it to 4chan, he sent an embarrassing piece of spam. I don't think the wordpress folks are going to load up in their six-faws[1] and shoot up the guy's house. Edit: Also, he's right here -- full name and picture, even -- on Acquia's own public site: http://www.acquia.com/about-us/team/dillon-vassallo http://www.acquia.com/about-us/team/dillon-vassallo [1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=64 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=64
      - ineedtosleep 14y ago
        I think the point is that all personally identifiable information would be redacted. That would include company name.
    - mseebach 14y ago
      > That's still a person who has to make a living. No, that's not an excuse. Having to make a living is not a free pass to be a douche[1] to strangers with impunity. 1: And the lies - "I was researching" which then makes "I'm sorry for the cold email" a second lie - makes him a douche.
    - No1 14y ago
      If the spammer does not want his personal information revealed, he probably shouldn't be emailing it to people he doesn't know.
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      Whine whine whine Too much political correctness can be bad. If you can't handle it, then don't cold-email people. He did nothing, just published this information (last name blurred, not sure if this was done afterwards) which in itself reveals no private information of any of the parts.
  - beachstartup 14y ago
    this is just as likely true as not true. enterprise sales organizations often do research on individual companies or market verticals, add entries into a big list, maybe combined with other marketing/sales people, and then do a mail merge from their CMS or other software. just because the sender may not have realized this particular corporation was a direct competitor does not mean they didn't do any research on the company or its market. perhaps sales guy was going through 200 companies that day in a list sorted on website traffic rankings, or annual revenues, or hosting provider, or any number of other bits of info. anyway, i run a startup, and i partially rely on received cold emails to get an understanding of the marketplace. we've found vendors, competitors, and VARs that we otherwise wouldn't have known existed. sorry, it's just the way it's done.
    - mitchellhislop 14y ago
      You are honestly making a case that someone did ANYTHING that resembled research, and still didn't figure out that they made their chief competitor, who is currently doing far better than them? Sorry, I just can't make that leap. The SERP for 'Automattic' is all that should have been required to move on.
      - beachstartup 14y ago
        market research and marketing is highly automated these days. this is the world you are helping to build.
      - analog 14y ago
        There's no reason why Automattic shouldn't use Drupal if it's the right tool for a particular job. Drupal projects have used Wordpress in the past, Microsoft use Linux servers etc etc.
  - derleth 14y ago
    > What a bold faced lie! I've always heard this as bald-faced lie.
    - yarrel 14y ago
      It's an italic lie, surely?
- neya 14y ago
  I don't know why you were downvoted, but I agree with you - It's highly unprofessional of someone like Matt to reveal some random Marketer's personal information, especialy considering the fact that he is not someone at the top like Matt, but works hard for a living to make his both ends meet. And my advice to Matt - It's a great offer, Wordpress is so FUCKED UP right now, worse than drupal that I wouldn't be surprised if this was even sent on purpose. (Try working out pagination for static pages, you will notice there are two GET variables ($page and $paged) for the same functionality (example of inconsistency) or try updating your Wordpress to the recent version AFTER a couple of months and tell me if it doesn't break your theme or plugin. They depreciate so many functions randomly, rename them unnecessarily, etc.) If I wanted a blog engine right now, my solution right now would be: $ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text Which I'm sure is much, much better.
  - envex 14y ago
    I'm not really sure how many plugins you're running, or even what type of things you're trying to do with your themes, but I work at a web dev company where WordPress is used for 95% of our clients and I haven't run into any issues using the auto updater in years.
  - westi 14y ago
    Hi, I'm sorry you've had a bad WordPress experience but I don't think your experience is typical - we try very hard to maintain backwards compatibility we don't deprecate randomly or rename thing unnecessarily IMHO. If you have specific examples of compatibility breaking changes we have made recently that caused you issues I would love to know about them so we can address them. I agreed that $page and $paged can be confusing - being able to both be on a page within a single item of content or on page X of the stream of blog items means we need two different variables - yes they could have better names but changing them would be backwards incompatible ;)
    - neya 14y ago
      Thanks for coming forward, I will let you know soon, I was using Wordpress for a client project for a Mobile Website builder as a full-fledged CMS some time back, and it kept breaking plugins and functionality on the site with each update. Also the $page and $paged is not documented well. It took me hours and hours of googling to find out about it..
- amorphid 14y ago
  When in doubt, take the high road.
- beyti 14y ago
  I strongly agree on that. That's just nice material with a bad presentation in the end for Matt
- Buzaga 14y ago
  What a dick move, I didn't know who 'Matt' was went to look the `about box` and there's only this "is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web" I'm this, this, this, also, I'm rich and I like to burn people publicly because I can
  - Encosia 14y ago
    I agree that he shouldn't have posted the guy's info, but Matt is one of the nicest guys you'll find overall.
- 8ig8 14y ago
  Sales guy made a mistake. We all do. Anyone else remember Matt's Hot Nacho mistake? Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/ http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/ Follow up: http://waxy.org/2005/04/wordpress_follo/ http://waxy.org/2005/04/wordpress_follo/ Matt's Response: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/ http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
- photomatt 14y ago
  You're right: I removed his last name and full number.
  - josh2600 14y ago
    :). Thanks Matt. I admire the effort you put forward leading the Wordpress Foundation and Automattic, but I felt like this was so surprising for exactly that reason. Keep making great software amigo.
- 8ig8 14y ago
  Looks like Matt had a change of heart. Good for him. Now we need a few comment edits here to give the guy a break.
tzaman 14y ago
This is kinda insulting towards Matt and the whole WordPress community. How can a person that represents a web firm be so ignorant?
vickytnz 14y ago
Recruiter: How many years of Rails experience do you have? DHH: ALL OF THEM https://gist.github.com/dhh/1285068 https://gist.github.com/dhh/1285068
- josh2600 14y ago
  Perfect example of how to do this without revealing personally identifying information. This is how it should be done, imho of course.
- Kiro 14y ago
  I don't get it. Should recruiters not contact him just because he's the creator of RoR?
  - rjbond3rd 14y ago
    Recruiters are often looking for, e.g., 10 years of experience in a technology which didn't exist 10 years ago.
  - brokentone 14y ago
    Should probably not send the inventor a form letter.
    - Encosia 14y ago
      It's particularly silly since anyone that researched dhh for a few minutes would know his very-public stance on Groupon. I can't imagine that they could say or do anything to get him to work there.
    - Kiro 14y ago
      The inventor of what? The letter had nothing to do with RoR.
      - brokentone 14y ago
        Makes it worse. Probably shouldn't target the leading guy in a popular technology with something else.
orangethirty 14y ago
That's not a bad cold-email. Much better than most SEO companies send out.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  Oh, good, better than most SEO companies. That's sure setting a high standard.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    It got them a lot of press. Think about for a minute.
mmuro 14y ago
Did Jason Fried just respond to Matt in his own way? http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3475-11-criticism-ratio http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3475-11-criticism-ratio
beachstartup 14y ago
pretty much the only thing i can conclude from this entire thread is that the acquia guy got caught red handed doing his job.
- ShaneOG 14y ago
  And now I've heard of Acquia.
dm8 14y ago
Sales 101 is missing here. You research someone whom you approach via cold email. Not randomly blasting email every blogger.
jami 14y ago
Hilarious. It wouldn't take much "research" to find out that Automattic is the Acquia of WordPress. Poor kid.
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
I bet this is the most honest advice Matt Mullenweg will get all week.
csomar 14y ago
You can mock their marketing, but it looks like it worked for them: http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-2012-inc-500#3 http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-...
donretag 14y ago
Acquia's response: https://www.acquia.com/blog/cold-truth-about-cold-call https://www.acquia.com/blog/cold-truth-about-cold-call
- nnq 14y ago
  I thought it was a twisted joke from Acquia to Automattic before seeing this ...I guess they don't even have a decent sense of humor :)
- malachismith 14y ago
  Wow. So the problem was that their messaging wasn't right? Seriously? Not that their sales people are clearly dialing for dollars from some boiler room using scraped lists? Not that they're hiring people who don't know someone who ANYONE working at a CMS related company should know? Not that they're lazy and sleazy and weak?
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  I give them props for being honest about the value of cold contacts. Almost anyone who wants to make it as an enterprise service company has to do this.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Good response. Honest and to the point. It sure reads like "we got caught with our hands in the cookie jar", well, that's why you get a PR company. Also: "but he shouldn’t have posted the contact details of our Acquia business development rep. Hoping he takes it down, immediately" Thumbs up for not being passive-agressive about it, now be a man and ask him directly. You have his email address after all
columbo 14y ago
Oh wow. I did cold-calling a lifetime ago. Wound up getting a place that dealt with bull sperm in my stack of 'service-orientated' companies. I must have spent an hour trying to explain what an ERP was. Nice guy though.
dkoch 14y ago
It's a funny situation, young guy in his first sales job out of school selling boss of his company's competition. But agree with other comments that it could have been anonymised.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
benatkin 14y ago
It isn't typical bad spam, because the company has some serious clout. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquia I think Matt did a good job here. He didn't ignore it and dismissed it in a nice way.
hunvreus 14y ago
What I find the most shocking in that message is not the fact that a sales rep at a company the size of Acquia is contacting the founder of a competitor product but more the way Acquia introduce itself: the "Redhat of Drupal". There has been a lot of discussion within the Drupal community about Acquia and how asphyxiating their presence is for the ecosystem, both on technical (direction of the actual project) and business levels (cannibalization of all the sales). I think it's perfectly fine they do so and wish them all the success they can have with this, but their public stance is always very defensive of doing so.

163 points by jdorfman 14y ago

Sounds like someone on the sales team wasn't informed about Wordpress. The relationship between the WP and Drupal communities is typically very amicable.

malachismith 14y ago
"wasn't informed"?!?!?! Umm... this is a hiring fail. You shouldn't have to be informed about the dominant player in your market.

josh2600 14y ago

I don't know. Clearly the sales guy didn't do any research and it's funny, but I think less of Matt for not hiding the gentlemen's information. Yes it's foolish to cold email someone like that but it seems petty and unnecessary to put this person "on blast" as it were.

qeorge 14y ago
I have the world's tiniest violin available for spammers who don't want their email addresses published. I especially loved this bit: "I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. " What a bold faced lie! Obviously he didn't spend even 2 seconds researching anything related to Automattic. Acquia harvested Matt's information and spammed him, and they deserve to be called out.
- josh2600 14y ago
  That's still a person who has to make a living. He could've made the point just as well while omitting personal information. The only value the identity adds is the potential for harassment (not insinuating that this is Matt's intention, only that this is the likely outcome of personal information on the internet in this day and age). I have no problem with calling out the company. I'd have no problem with the first name even. But the phone number and last name are personally identifying and unnecessarily endanger the representative.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    "Unnecessarily endanger the representative"? He didn't set a puppy on fire and post it to 4chan, he sent an embarrassing piece of spam. I don't think the wordpress folks are going to load up in their six-faws[1] and shoot up the guy's house. Edit: Also, he's right here -- full name and picture, even -- on Acquia's own public site: http://www.acquia.com/about-us/team/dillon-vassallo http://www.acquia.com/about-us/team/dillon-vassallo [1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=64 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=64
    - ineedtosleep 14y ago
      I think the point is that all personally identifiable information would be redacted. That would include company name.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    > That's still a person who has to make a living. No, that's not an excuse. Having to make a living is not a free pass to be a douche[1] to strangers with impunity. 1: And the lies - "I was researching" which then makes "I'm sorry for the cold email" a second lie - makes him a douche.
  - No1 14y ago
    If the spammer does not want his personal information revealed, he probably shouldn't be emailing it to people he doesn't know.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Whine whine whine Too much political correctness can be bad. If you can't handle it, then don't cold-email people. He did nothing, just published this information (last name blurred, not sure if this was done afterwards) which in itself reveals no private information of any of the parts.
- beachstartup 14y ago
  this is just as likely true as not true. enterprise sales organizations often do research on individual companies or market verticals, add entries into a big list, maybe combined with other marketing/sales people, and then do a mail merge from their CMS or other software. just because the sender may not have realized this particular corporation was a direct competitor does not mean they didn't do any research on the company or its market. perhaps sales guy was going through 200 companies that day in a list sorted on website traffic rankings, or annual revenues, or hosting provider, or any number of other bits of info. anyway, i run a startup, and i partially rely on received cold emails to get an understanding of the marketplace. we've found vendors, competitors, and VARs that we otherwise wouldn't have known existed. sorry, it's just the way it's done.
  - mitchellhislop 14y ago
    You are honestly making a case that someone did ANYTHING that resembled research, and still didn't figure out that they made their chief competitor, who is currently doing far better than them? Sorry, I just can't make that leap. The SERP for 'Automattic' is all that should have been required to move on.
    - beachstartup 14y ago
      market research and marketing is highly automated these days. this is the world you are helping to build.
    - analog 14y ago
      There's no reason why Automattic shouldn't use Drupal if it's the right tool for a particular job. Drupal projects have used Wordpress in the past, Microsoft use Linux servers etc etc.
- derleth 14y ago
  > What a bold faced lie! I've always heard this as bald-faced lie.
  - yarrel 14y ago
    It's an italic lie, surely?
neya 14y ago
I don't know why you were downvoted, but I agree with you - It's highly unprofessional of someone like Matt to reveal some random Marketer's personal information, especialy considering the fact that he is not someone at the top like Matt, but works hard for a living to make his both ends meet. And my advice to Matt - It's a great offer, Wordpress is so FUCKED UP right now, worse than drupal that I wouldn't be surprised if this was even sent on purpose. (Try working out pagination for static pages, you will notice there are two GET variables ($page and $paged) for the same functionality (example of inconsistency) or try updating your Wordpress to the recent version AFTER a couple of months and tell me if it doesn't break your theme or plugin. They depreciate so many functions randomly, rename them unnecessarily, etc.) If I wanted a blog engine right now, my solution right now would be: $ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text Which I'm sure is much, much better.
- envex 14y ago
  I'm not really sure how many plugins you're running, or even what type of things you're trying to do with your themes, but I work at a web dev company where WordPress is used for 95% of our clients and I haven't run into any issues using the auto updater in years.
- westi 14y ago
  Hi, I'm sorry you've had a bad WordPress experience but I don't think your experience is typical - we try very hard to maintain backwards compatibility we don't deprecate randomly or rename thing unnecessarily IMHO. If you have specific examples of compatibility breaking changes we have made recently that caused you issues I would love to know about them so we can address them. I agreed that $page and $paged can be confusing - being able to both be on a page within a single item of content or on page X of the stream of blog items means we need two different variables - yes they could have better names but changing them would be backwards incompatible ;)
  - neya 14y ago
    Thanks for coming forward, I will let you know soon, I was using Wordpress for a client project for a Mobile Website builder as a full-fledged CMS some time back, and it kept breaking plugins and functionality on the site with each update. Also the $page and $paged is not documented well. It took me hours and hours of googling to find out about it..
amorphid 14y ago
When in doubt, take the high road.
beyti 14y ago
I strongly agree on that. That's just nice material with a bad presentation in the end for Matt
Buzaga 14y ago
What a dick move, I didn't know who 'Matt' was went to look the `about box` and there's only this "is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web" I'm this, this, this, also, I'm rich and I like to burn people publicly because I can
- Encosia 14y ago
  I agree that he shouldn't have posted the guy's info, but Matt is one of the nicest guys you'll find overall.
8ig8 14y ago
Sales guy made a mistake. We all do. Anyone else remember Matt's Hot Nacho mistake? Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/ http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/ Follow up: http://waxy.org/2005/04/wordpress_follo/ http://waxy.org/2005/04/wordpress_follo/ Matt's Response: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/ http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
photomatt 14y ago
You're right: I removed his last name and full number.
- josh2600 14y ago
  :). Thanks Matt. I admire the effort you put forward leading the Wordpress Foundation and Automattic, but I felt like this was so surprising for exactly that reason. Keep making great software amigo.
8ig8 14y ago
Looks like Matt had a change of heart. Good for him. Now we need a few comment edits here to give the guy a break.

tzaman 14y ago

This is kinda insulting towards Matt and the whole WordPress community. How can a person that represents a web firm be so ignorant?

vickytnz 14y ago

Recruiter: How many years of Rails experience do you have? DHH: ALL OF THEM https://gist.github.com/dhh/1285068 https://gist.github.com/dhh/1285068

josh2600 14y ago
Perfect example of how to do this without revealing personally identifying information. This is how it should be done, imho of course.
Kiro 14y ago
I don't get it. Should recruiters not contact him just because he's the creator of RoR?
- rjbond3rd 14y ago
  Recruiters are often looking for, e.g., 10 years of experience in a technology which didn't exist 10 years ago.
- brokentone 14y ago
  Should probably not send the inventor a form letter.
  - Encosia 14y ago
    It's particularly silly since anyone that researched dhh for a few minutes would know his very-public stance on Groupon. I can't imagine that they could say or do anything to get him to work there.
  - Kiro 14y ago
    The inventor of what? The letter had nothing to do with RoR.
    - brokentone 14y ago
      Makes it worse. Probably shouldn't target the leading guy in a popular technology with something else.

orangethirty 14y ago

That's not a bad cold-email. Much better than most SEO companies send out.

ceejayoz 14y ago
Oh, good, better than most SEO companies. That's sure setting a high standard.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  It got them a lot of press. Think about for a minute.

mmuro 14y ago

Did Jason Fried just respond to Matt in his own way? http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3475-11-criticism-ratio http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3475-11-criticism-ratio

beachstartup 14y ago

pretty much the only thing i can conclude from this entire thread is that the acquia guy got caught red handed doing his job.

ShaneOG 14y ago
And now I've heard of Acquia.

dm8 14y ago

Sales 101 is missing here. You research someone whom you approach via cold email. Not randomly blasting email every blogger.

jami 14y ago

Hilarious. It wouldn't take much "research" to find out that Automattic is the Acquia of WordPress. Poor kid.

Samuel_Michon 14y ago

I bet this is the most honest advice Matt Mullenweg will get all week.

csomar 14y ago

You can mock their marketing, but it looks like it worked for them: http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-2012-inc-500#3 http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-...

donretag 14y ago

Acquia's response: https://www.acquia.com/blog/cold-truth-about-cold-call https://www.acquia.com/blog/cold-truth-about-cold-call

nnq 14y ago
I thought it was a twisted joke from Acquia to Automattic before seeing this ...I guess they don't even have a decent sense of humor :)
malachismith 14y ago
Wow. So the problem was that their messaging wasn't right? Seriously? Not that their sales people are clearly dialing for dollars from some boiler room using scraped lists? Not that they're hiring people who don't know someone who ANYONE working at a CMS related company should know? Not that they're lazy and sleazy and weak?
snowwrestler 14y ago
I give them props for being honest about the value of cold contacts. Almost anyone who wants to make it as an enterprise service company has to do this.
raverbashing 14y ago
Good response. Honest and to the point. It sure reads like "we got caught with our hands in the cookie jar", well, that's why you get a PR company. Also: "but he shouldn’t have posted the contact details of our Acquia business development rep. Hoping he takes it down, immediately" Thumbs up for not being passive-agressive about it, now be a man and ask him directly. You have his email address after all

columbo 14y ago

Oh wow. I did cold-calling a lifetime ago. Wound up getting a place that dealt with bull sperm in my stack of 'service-orientated' companies. I must have spent an hour trying to explain what an ERP was. Nice guy though.

dkoch 14y ago

It's a funny situation, young guy in his first sales job out of school selling boss of his company's competition. But agree with other comments that it could have been anonymised.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

benatkin 14y ago

It isn't typical bad spam, because the company has some serious clout. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquia I think Matt did a good job here. He didn't ignore it and dismissed it in a nice way.

hunvreus 14y ago

What I find the most shocking in that message is not the fact that a sales rep at a company the size of Acquia is contacting the founder of a competitor product but more the way Acquia introduce itself: the "Redhat of Drupal". There has been a lot of discussion within the Drupal community about Acquia and how asphyxiating their presence is for the ecosystem, both on technical (direction of the actual project) and business levels (cannibalization of all the sales). I think it's perfectly fine they do so and wish them all the success they can have with this, but their public stance is always very defensive of doing so.