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May 02, 2003
Social faces
Social faces: Something I particularly like about events like Jax and OSCON is the fact that I get to meet people again. Working in open source area brings down certain barriers that exist in the normal world of customer-relations - so meeting customers that are using open source is always more fun. It loses that sense of "we have to sell you something" and "here are our new shiny brochures" and becomes more of a peer-conversation. Of course we're out to sell something in the end - and creating new business is important - but its more... relaxed. For want of a better word. Something that is hard to get other people to understand.
An example: This morning I chatted for an hour on the phone to someone I've never met personally and who works in one of the major telcos in Europe. They're using Cocoon and so we spent basically the hour where he told me what they had done and what issues they had and so on. I told him what we did and gave him a couple of answers to questions he had. Now hopefully, we'll be meeting up at Jax for a further talk and of course in the end it would be great if we could get into some business relationship. But for now it's someone who is using Cocoon and wants to know how to carry on and how to avoid certain mistakes. And you can bet that he'll get that from us without me saying up front "well that will be xxx € an hour before I talk to you".
The interesting thing is that in the end this will pay off. In fact we had the first contact with many customers we now have some months ago. Then there was a lull when they tried things out themselves and now - once they've worked out that open source can get the job done - they come back.
Hard to explain to people more involved in traditional marketing and something that perhaps you have to have experienced to really understand. People like Steven will hopefully agree with this.
Posted by Matthew at May 2, 2003 09:11 PM