2005-06-24 18:00:42

Speaking: 11 July in St. Louis

On July 11th I will be speaking at the St. Louis C# User Group.  This is [apparently] a sub-group of the St. Louis .NET User Group.

My presentation will be based on an article I am writing which will be published here on my weblog shortly after that meeting.  I sent the organizers the following snippet from the article as an abstract:

Luckily, a lot of this "non computer science stuff" is fairly intuitive.  We've got no training and no experience on such matters, but if we can figure out how to write a multithreaded network server, we can probably rent office space without screwing it up too badly.  But one area consistently confounds us.   In my opinion, nothing in a small ISV is more difficult for a geek than market competition. 

We can understand deep abstractions and object oriented programming.  We have no problem grasping how virtual memory works.  Some of us can even remember the keystrokes to do a search and replace in vi.  But when geeks start talking about the issues of software product strategy in a competitive market, otherwise intelligent people suddenly sound like Paris Hilton.  We just don't get it.  Geeks understand market competition about as well as married men understand their wives.

But my convictions remain unchanged, so I am always looking for ways to explain this topic in terms that geeks will find intuitive.  Along those lines, this article proceeds from a single observation:  Geeks don't understand marketing, but they do understand games.

What does this article have to do with C# ?  Not sure.  I hope to figure that out between now and the meeting.  :-)