[clug] Free Ubuntu?

[Robert Edwards]

Sam Couter wrote:
> Paul Wayper <paulway at mabula.net> wrote:
>> It's still a flawed argument - they spend plenty of money doing showy things
>> at E3 and so forth for little actual guaranteed return.
> 
> Little tangible return perhaps. I'd imagine the convention/demo/show
> money comes from the marketing budget, and people don't spend billions
> of dollars on marketing because it doesn't work.

This is really getting off-topic, but... I'm not sure this is a totally
supportable argument. Seems to me that "investment" in marketing is one
of the easiest ways to hide funny money and to pay kick-backs. All an
auditor can really look at is how much an organisation spends on their
marketing as compared to their competitors. Everything else is just
statistics, which can say almost anything you want them to.

I'm not saying that the Aust. Federal Govt.'s recent huge blowout in 
their "public information campaigns" as revealed in the Senate Estimates
Committees was the pollies greasing the palms of the big media moguls,
but it can't hurt them (in the future) to keep these big boys on side
now, can it? (I note that the ABC reported much more strongly on this
than the commercial stations - I wonder why?...)

Anyway, I generally see marketing as a huge unproductive waste of
resources. If you have a good product, people who want to know will
find out about it and you don't need all the FUD that your competitors
will put up about it in their "marketing".

But I did enjoy the Google-sponsored pizza at the last CLUG meeting,
although I am not Googling any more or less frequently than I used to,
and some advertising campaigns are very funny - 
http://gprime.net/video.php/bigad ...

Sorry for the rant.

Bob Edwards.