Slashdot Mirror

Sounds like Van Halen's m&m clause
http://businessofsoftware.org/...

"One practical application of the sorter could be creating a bowl of M&Ms - with all the brown ones removed."

According to Dan and Chip Heath, that's just what rock band Van Halen demand in one of the riders to their standard contract. The band's "M&M clause" was written into its contract to serve a very speciïc purpose. It was called Article 126, and it read as follows: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." The article was buried in the middle of countless technical speciïcations. When David Lee Roth would arrive at a new venue, he'd immediately walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he'd demand a line check of the entire production. "Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error," said Roth. "They didn't read the contract. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show."

This. The same way that we get pissed off when an idea person wants someone to "just" program for them, techies need to learn that marketing -- good marketing -- is actually hard and requires some skill. Sales and marketing are not just bullshit and pretty pictures and booze and blow and hookers and sheeple.

If marketing were easy, and if Apple's success were due only to marketing (as is so often claimed), then their success would be easy to replicate, right? The fact is, neither of those statements is true.

Good marketing is not something you can just add to a product after the fact. Like good design, it has to be thought of throughout. I highly recommend you spend an hour watching this. In that talk, he was specifically addressing programmers.

... he's saying that you've got to be creative, work your ass off, make something remarkably good, and then market the hell out of it in order to be successful, just like any other product?!?!? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

As usual, the answer is more complicated and has to do with the size of your team, the maturity of your product, and the acceptable risk profile of your market.

• Are you writing a proof-of-concept prototype?
• Are you putting together a demo user interface?
• Are you writing flight control software?

• Most importantly

• Is your product mature or still a twinkle in your eye?

Erik Sink gave a wonderful talk on the maturity of software. As he put it - shipping too early is one of the worst mistakes you can make to your teenaged software.

Fundementally, Paul Graham is being a troll. Or he needs to get out in the real world a bit more.

There's a free eBook of 'Eric Sink on the Business of Software' available on the site too. Great book - full of insights.