RE: [PHP4BETA] Marketing Plan was Re: [PHP4BETA] Help craft PHP d escription

I agree and I will volunteer. I just went through a situation where our CTO is very Microsoft-centric and because we couldn't provide him with hard-core stats (i.e. High Availability web sites that are using PHP) as to why PHP is better, we're going to ultimately be moving to an all Microsoft shop. So count me in to do whatever I have to do to make sure I don't have to go through this again. -D -----Original Message----- From: Anindo Ghosh [mailto:anindo@bigfoot.com] Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2000 4:08 PM To: php4beta@lists.php.net; Php3@Lists. Php. Net Subject: RE: [PHP4BETA] Marketing Plan was Re: [PHP4BETA] Help craft PHP description Regards, all :-) In many consulting assignments recommending strategic decisions for B2Bs, market exchanges, and massive content sites, I've come up against "Obviously PHP is not a serious middleware option like [ ASP | Java | ColdFusion | Flavor-of-the-Week-middleware-solution ]" (it isn't?) from the know-it-all CTOs and Technology Vice Presidents. Obviously they are getting lots of good feeding and nurturing from the publicity mills of the respective product companies. Good for them, but it's come to a stage where consultants like me can save a lot of time, effort and Pepto-Bismol in the long run by putting in a concerted effort by just combining our forces, putting together all the stuff we've researched and written up, and all the cooked up or real statistics we've used in client presentations. <STEP 1> The next hurdle I come up with is "Show me a competing site that uses PHP". Oops! An amazing number of sites have URLs with extensions like "phtml", "xhtml" and so on - Yes, even one of my clients uses "zhtml" extensions on their PHP pages because they do not want to let their competition know they're using PHP! Therefore: Is there a reliable way of accumulating stats on big-name commercial sites using PHP? Not the mavericks, as they dobn't hold much water with the hard core commercial blokes. Is there a sneaky way of determining that some "advanced_query.htmx" is actually PHP? <STEP 2> Of course, such gathered stats need to be organized by business, by country, and by brand recognition (which seems to be by far the most important consideration), so that we consultants can quickly look up sites in the specific segment a given client belongs to. It'll grow, over time, but we've got to start. PHPHoo seems like a good categorization tool, and it's written in PHP too! Is anyone ready to set this up? A PHP Detection crawler, a PHPHoo directory, and a automatic reporting tool (eg. The Following B2B Metal Exchanges use PHP today...) are what we need on this front <STEP 3> Now, the last major stumbling block: "Okay, we'll try out PHP, but what big-name PHP training courses do you recommend? And where do we source the 35 developers, 4 project leaders, 2 coordinators we need ASAP?" Okay, so someone ought to be setting up a PHP skill pool, a skill exchange or meatmarket even. "We'll bid $1000 a day for each of those 15 PHP devs, as long as they have expertise-level ratings of BB or BB+". <STEP 4> I'm volunteering my time on each of the above STEPs 1-4, and it would be good to hear of another few STEPs to really make it bulletproof to recommend PHP to any new client, whenever appropriate. Any other takers? --- Reply by email if you prefer, or ICQ me at 13337584. Warm Regards --- Anindo Ghosh anindo@bigfoot.com --- Nurture geekdom where you find it -- adopt a babygeek today! ---> Kirrily "Skud" Robert, "geek chicks: second thoughts" --- -- PHP 4.0 Beta Mailing List <http://www.php.net/version4/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: php4beta-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php4beta-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php4beta-admin@lists.php.net