Dereliction of Duty

Recently started looking into Metadata Registries and UDEF and related semantic technology.

The Wikipedia page lists a bunch of relevant Metadata Registry projects and commercial products.  Very nice.  Easy to follow the links and determine features and benefits.

However.

A client has IBM Cognos.  Is there any easy to to see what kind of Metadata features are part of Cognos?

No.  Not really.

I wondered about this marketing gap.  Why doesn't IBM (or Oracle, they're pretty bad at this also) provide a tidy list of features?

• They're so big (and arrogant) that they don't feel the need to do any marketing?
• They're so paranoid that they don't want to have their products reduce to a simple bullet list?
• They're sales people are so good that they don't need a web presence to sell their products?
• They already have such tight wired-in relationships that they don't need to do any marketing?

Or is it the "growth by acquisition" problem?  Since IBM acquired Cognos, they hesitate to commit to a list of features?

Whatever the reason, it's frankly difficult to include IBM products in an easy-to-understand info-graphic comparing alternative products.

Sales Person with Principles

My MacBook has an 80Gb drive with less than 2Gb available. A few times I've totally filled the disk and had to spend time judiciously searching and removing old files. Sigh.

I have (and use) external hard drives, but it seems to violate some kind of "laptop" principle to be tethered to the desk. Backups, yes; general writing, no.

I use a 4Gb thumb drive for much of my writing. That allows me to travel with just my work laptop without synchronizing files. It also allows me to work with poor or no connectivity.

Today, I went to my local Apple Store to talk about a new MacBook Pro. The sales person had a bunch of ways to preserve my old machine by using removable hard drives and my Mobile Me account. After a long conversation I had to beg them to sell me a new computer. It appears that they'd rather preserve my investment than wring more money out of me.

What? Make do with "good enough"? Improve slightly to solve the actual problem I actually have? Spend the least to get the most? That seems downright un-American!

The sales person was pretty sure I didn't need a MacBook Pro. A MacBook was good enough. (I have a older FireWire video camera, so the Pro is necessary.)

And that's not all. The on-line purchases from http://store.apple.com/ allow more customization. In-store purchases do not have the same degree of customization. Since my needs were unique, the sales person sent me home empty-handed rather than sell me a product that's not exactly what I need. We went through the on-line ordering a few different ways to explore what I actually need.

It's odd to meet principled sales people.