
The Redhat of Drupal - jdorfman
http://ma.tt/2013/03/the-redhat-of-drupal/
======
josh2600
I don't know. Clearly the sales guy didn't do any research and it's funny, but
I think less of Matt for not hiding the gentlemen's information.

Yes it's foolish to cold email someone like that but it seems petty and
unnecessary to put this person "on blast" as it were.

~~~
neya
I don't know why you were downvoted, but I agree with you - It's highly
unprofessional of someone like Matt to reveal some random Marketer's personal
information, especialy considering the fact that he is not someone at the top
like Matt, but works hard for a living to make his both ends meet.

And my advice to Matt - It's a great offer, Wordpress is so FUCKED UP right
now, worse than drupal that I wouldn't be surprised if this was even sent on
purpose. (Try working out pagination for static pages, you will notice there
are two GET variables ($page and $paged) for the same functionality (example
of inconsistency) or try updating your Wordpress to the recent version AFTER a
couple of months and tell me if it doesn't break your theme or plugin. They
depreciate so many functions randomly, rename them unnecessarily, etc.)

If I wanted a blog engine right now, my solution right now would be:

    
    
        $ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
    

Which I'm sure is much, much better.

~~~
westi
Hi, I'm sorry you've had a bad WordPress experience but I don't think your
experience is typical - we try very hard to maintain backwards compatibility
we don't deprecate randomly or rename thing unnecessarily IMHO.

If you have specific examples of compatibility breaking changes we have made
recently that caused you issues I would love to know about them so we can
address them.

I agreed that $page and $paged can be confusing - being able to both be on a
page within a single item of content or on page X of the stream of blog items
means we need two different variables - yes they could have better names but
changing them would be backwards incompatible ;)

~~~
neya
Thanks for coming forward, I will let you know soon, I was using Wordpress for
a client project for a Mobile Website builder as a full-fledged CMS some time
back, and it kept breaking plugins and functionality on the site with each
update. Also the $page and $paged is not documented well. It took me hours and
hours of googling to find out about it..

------
vickytnz
Recruiter: How many years of Rails experience do you have? DHH: ALL OF THEM
<https://gist.github.com/dhh/1285068>

~~~
Kiro
I don't get it. Should recruiters not contact him just because he's the
creator of RoR?

~~~
brokentone
Should probably not send the inventor a form letter.

~~~
Kiro
The inventor of what? The letter had nothing to do with RoR.

~~~
brokentone
Makes it worse. Probably shouldn't target the leading guy in a popular
technology with something else.

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mmuro
Did Jason Fried just respond to Matt in his own way?

<http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3475-11-criticism-ratio>

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donretag
Acquia's response: <https://www.acquia.com/blog/cold-truth-about-cold-call>

~~~
malachismith
Wow. So the problem was that their messaging wasn't right? Seriously? Not that
their sales people are clearly dialing for dollars from some boiler room using
scraped lists? Not that they're hiring people who don't know someone who
ANYONE working at a CMS related company should know? Not that they're lazy and
sleazy and weak?

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geerlingguy
Sounds like someone on the sales team wasn't informed about Wordpress. The
relationship between the WP and Drupal communities is typically very amicable.

~~~
malachismith
"wasn't informed"?!?!?! Umm... this is a hiring fail. You shouldn't have to be
informed about the dominant player in your market.

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csomar
You can mock their marketing, but it looks like it worked for them:
[http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-
mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-...](http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-
mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-2012-inc-500#3)

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hunvreus
What I find the most shocking in that message is not the fact that a sales rep
at a company the size of Acquia is contacting the founder of a competitor
product but more the way Acquia introduce itself: the "Redhat of Drupal".

There has been a lot of discussion within the Drupal community about Acquia
and how asphyxiating their presence is for the ecosystem, both on technical
(direction of the actual project) and business levels (cannibalization of all
the sales).

I think it's perfectly fine they do so and wish them all the success they can
have with this, but their public stance is always very defensive of doing so.

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dm8
Sales 101 is missing here. You research someone whom you approach via cold
email. Not randomly blasting email every blogger.

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tzaman
This is kinda insulting towards Matt and the whole WordPress community. How
can a person that represents a web firm be so ignorant?

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jami
Hilarious. It wouldn't take much "research" to find out that Automattic is the
Acquia of WordPress. Poor kid.

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beachstartup
pretty much the only thing i can conclude from this entire thread is that the
acquia guy got caught red handed doing his job.

~~~
ShaneOG
And now I've heard of Acquia.

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columbo
Oh wow. I did cold-calling a lifetime ago. Wound up getting a place that dealt
with bull sperm in my stack of 'service-orientated' companies. I must have
spent an hour trying to explain what an ERP was. Nice guy though.

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orangethirty
That's not a bad cold-email. Much better than most SEO companies send out.

~~~
ceejayoz
Oh, good, better than most SEO companies. That's sure setting a high standard.

~~~
orangethirty
It got them a lot of press. Think about for a minute.

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Samuel_Michon
I bet this is the most honest advice Matt Mullenweg will get all week.

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benatkin
It isn't typical bad spam, because the company has some serious clout.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquia>

I think Matt did a good job here. He didn't ignore it and dismissed it in a
nice way.

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dkoch
It's a funny situation, young guy in his first sales job out of school selling
boss of his company's competition. But agree with other comments that it could
have been anonymised.

