Has anyone noticed how the Readers Digest snail mails telling you that you have been selected for one of their cash draws read exactly like a lot of spam messages ?
I don't know abut anyone else, but I am Sooooo over Star Wars. Lucas should have left it at the first 3 movies. If it wasn't for Moulan Rouge, the last two would be at the top of my all time crappiest movie list.
I've used quite a number of headhunters over the years and found them to general be useless. I have 20 years in IT with experience ranging from mainframes to PCs.
Just after the.Com bust, I found myself with a redundancy and no job. I emailed at least 50+ emails a week to headhunters about positions and if I was lucky got 2 or 3 actual replies and a single phone call. most of them didn't even send me a pre-written get lost email.
Of all the jobs I've had, headhunters got me about 1 or 2. The rest I found through my own means.
My preference would be to never deal with them again, they are rude, usually ignorant of the technologies they are looking for, and can't see beyond a list of acronyms requested.
So why do I deal with them still - here in Australia they practically have a monopoly on the job market. Maybe 1 in 200 jobs are not through a headhunter. Headhunters here are so desparate to get the jobs from clients that they have even resorted to ringing each other pretending to be people looking for work and then trying to steal the clients away once they find out who it is.
In my experience the biggest issue is not technology or price, but customer apathy. Most of the people I know are using MS Windows due to one of two reasons:
It came on the system and they can't be bothered changing it.
In their perception, windows is what everyone else uses, so that is what they should use.
The interesting thing here is that quite a few are using Pirated versions of windows (No I can't name names;-) and other software. Pretty much because of reason #2. They ask around, find out what other people are using and get that. They would rather run illegal software than use free software that works differently to the rest of the world.
I'm not sure that the whole idea of running windows software is a good one. it was tried with OS/2. Everyone who ran windows software on it agreed that generally speaking it ran better, The problem was that customer apathy said that it wasn't enough better. So they kept using windows.
In my experience if you want people to move to a different OS (be it Linux, OS/2, whatever) you must give then more than "it's better" as a reason. You must "show" them that they will be massively better off by the move.
One of the most powerful motivators to get people to change is to get them thinking that their neighbour is better off than they are. Greener lawn because of "Miricle Grow", faster car by buying Caltex instead of Exxon, better computer because of Linux instead of Windows. If a person thinks that they are being deprived, then they will generally do something about it. It does not matter whether the product is actually better or not.
In this case selling OS by running windows doesn't really do anything for the user. Sure we can use the crash protection and smoother running arguments, but in general the difference is not enough to make the sale. Instead I think we need to sell it based on how much better the linux apps are than their windows counter parts. Sure Linux is a (said quietly) little harder to setup. But the benefits of the software you can run are the sellers.
I used this technique when talking to people about OS/2 years ago and am still convinced that if IBM had the ability to sell it, it would not be dead.
So don't tell a user about running his window apps. Tell him/her about downloading files/compiling a new custom kernel/playing an mp3 and running seti all at the same time. Ask them to try the equivalent on a windows machine.
My personal favourite at the moment is that seti runs over 200% faster under Linux on the same hardware. 8 hours a unit down to 3.5 hours. That turns heads.
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Has anyone noticed how the Readers Digest snail mails telling you that you have been selected for one of their cash draws read exactly like a lot of spam messages ?
I don't know abut anyone else, but I am Sooooo over Star Wars. Lucas should have left it at the first 3 movies. If it wasn't for Moulan Rouge, the last two would be at the top of my all time crappiest movie list.
Just after the .Com bust, I found myself with a redundancy and no job. I emailed at least 50+ emails a week to headhunters about positions and if I was lucky got 2 or 3 actual replies and a single phone call. most of them didn't even send me a pre-written get lost email.
Of all the jobs I've had, headhunters got me about 1 or 2. The rest I found through my own means.
My preference would be to never deal with them again, they are rude, usually ignorant of the technologies they are looking for, and can't see beyond a list of acronyms requested.
So why do I deal with them still - here in Australia they practically have a monopoly on the job market. Maybe 1 in 200 jobs are not through a headhunter. Headhunters here are so desparate to get the jobs from clients that they have even resorted to ringing each other pretending to be people looking for work and then trying to steal the clients away once they find out who it is.
Scumbags. Derek.
The interesting thing here is that quite a few are using Pirated versions of windows (No I can't name names ;-) and other software. Pretty much because of reason #2. They ask around, find out what other people are using and get that. They would rather run illegal software than use free software that works differently to the rest of the world.
I'm not sure that the whole idea of running windows software is a good one. it was tried with OS/2. Everyone who ran windows software on it agreed that generally speaking it ran better, The problem was that customer apathy said that it wasn't enough better. So they kept using windows.
In my experience if you want people to move to a different OS (be it Linux, OS/2, whatever) you must give then more than "it's better" as a reason. You must "show" them that they will be massively better off by the move.
One of the most powerful motivators to get people to change is to get them thinking that their neighbour is better off than they are. Greener lawn because of "Miricle Grow", faster car by buying Caltex instead of Exxon, better computer because of Linux instead of Windows. If a person thinks that they are being deprived, then they will generally do something about it. It does not matter whether the product is actually better or not.
In this case selling OS by running windows doesn't really do anything for the user. Sure we can use the crash protection and smoother running arguments, but in general the difference is not enough to make the sale. Instead I think we need to sell it based on how much better the linux apps are than their windows counter parts. Sure Linux is a (said quietly) little harder to setup. But the benefits of the software you can run are the sellers.
I used this technique when talking to people about OS/2 years ago and am still convinced that if IBM had the ability to sell it, it would not be dead.
So don't tell a user about running his window apps. Tell him/her about downloading files/compiling a new custom kernel/playing an mp3 and running seti all at the same time. Ask them to try the equivalent on a windows machine.
My personal favourite at the moment is that seti runs over 200% faster under Linux on the same hardware. 8 hours a unit down to 3.5 hours. That turns heads.
Regards,
Derek.