Its great to see all the enthusiasm for marketing Firebird, particularly
with all the press that is going on right now.

I just wanted to add something very important in the art of marketing &
selling that we should consistently remember....

Sell BENEFITS, not FEATURES.

This is particularly true in our industry. Technology is full of features.
But no one is going to spend enough time to understand what something can do
unless they encounter it with a specific requirement in mind. Most of the
MySQL following probably didn't hunt down MySQL but just 'found' it in their
Linux distros and decided it was worth investigating. By the time they
finished that great LAMP app, it was too late to realize they have to start
to pay MySQL for commercial licensing.

But if we sell the BENEFITS of Firebird, particularly to developers of
software who have been screwed with royalty fees after they have committed
enormous and expensive resources into building software, we'd get a lot of
attention. I'd even suggest going as far as getting REAL case studies of
software companies that had been using another product and switched to
Firebird. Their experiences, their BENEFITS and their financial savings as
a result is enough to grab attention out there. The fact that it has all
the technical frills is just icing on the cake, but if we could swing some
big name vertical market apps or even general apps over to Firebird, and
leverage off the references from it, we'd expand our market exponetially.

A couple of thoughts to throw into the already wonderful discussons on this
subject.

Myles


============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions US, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
www.techsol.org