"Be This Guy"

[Walt Brown]

Richmond,
Maybe they just hired an enthusiastic, fresh-out, naïve marketing person,
for whom we should cut some slack :-) Or maybe the Scottish Valley Girls
need to do SOMETHING to justify their expense to Inland Revenue...
Walt


On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 2:49 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>wrote:

> Why do I feel that RunRev have been scraping the barrel recently?
>
> I wonder if the, unintended, result of their open source initiative is
> that their income has
> dropped considerably; hence the rather childish adverts.
>
> My e-mail inboxes (I have 2 e-mail addresses that are personal and one for
> my Devawriter)
> seem to get at least one RunRev advert a day, and, as such, I don't mind
> that.
>
> But there is something I don't like; the implication of these adverts
> seems to be that any old moron
> can write computer programs ; something that is palpably not true. And my
> ego feels bruised by
> the corollary that if any old moron can write computer programs with
> Livecode then I must be any old moron (and I'm not; I'm a special type of
> moron in a category of my own).
>
> Certainly that "BE THIS GUY" (Who would you rather be? and the answer is
> 'anybody else') advert does not
> do RunRev many favours; it comes out of the British 'dumb everything down
> to the stage where its just simply insulting' school of thought that seems
> to be pretty well all pervasive throughout the British Isles.
>
> This started with the slightly prognathous girl on the new RunRev website
> who is spacing out with her
> mall-rat friends (Scottish valley girls; the open sewer that runs between
> Edinburgh and Glasgow, starting
> with Westerhailes [heroin capital of the world] and moving through
> Hamilton [Buckfast tonic wine capital
> of the world]; 2 national disgraces and social bombsites whichever way you
> look at them) and has moved slowly down-market from there ("'down market'
> from Westerhailes" I hear you ask; well, I did see somebody injecting
> themselves with heroin in a carpark right smackdown by the river Tay in
> Dundee in 2003; so, if one thinks about parts of Lochee and Hilltown, it is
> just about possible).
>
> As somebody who has learnt about 9 programming languages (and most of the
> people on the RunRev use-list will better me there), I am well aware that
> learning to program is NOT for any old moron, and to imply so
> with "Tracy Beaker on Speed" types of adverts is disingenuous insofar as
> it gives any moronic programmer wannabees out there a distinctly wrong
> impression, and it will drive away more intelligent and motivated typoes
> towards programming languages/IDEs/packages that don't promote themselves
> through kiddy-crap.
>
> The whole thing reminds me of a Steve Martin film called "The Jerk",
> where, at one point, Steve Martin, playing the epynomous lead character, is
> drinking some multicolored cocktail out of a glass with a paper umbrella in
> it, and pointing at an advert the same cocktail saying "be somebody".
>
> "With 8 x 1 hour long lessons and a 1 hour 1-1 Skype Session and a Live
> Q&A Session every week you could produce the #1 selling app."
>
> Possibly; but not if you are a person who wants to "be somebody" in the
> way the advert presents things.
>
> RunRev produce a fantastic product; a product that can produce simple
> Powerpoint-like slideshows to incredibly complicated stuff (my Devawriter
> being about 25% along that line); so advertising Livecode like
> this is just doing RunRev a disservice.
>
> ------
>
> Jump on me.
>
> Agree.
>
> Disagree.
>
> BUT; Please, don't keep quiet.  I do feel that as parts of what RunRev
> choose to call a 'community' and
> like to tell us that we have some sort of say and input on what their
> company does, we should voice our opinions in this respect (as well as all
> the others).
>
> ------
>
> Richmond.
>
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