I have the world's tiniest violin available for spammers who don't want their email addresses published.
I especially loved this bit: "I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. "
What a bold faced lie! Obviously he didn't spend even 2 seconds researching anything related to Automattic. Acquia harvested Matt's information and spammed him, and they deserve to be called out.
He could've made the point just as well while omitting personal information. The only value the identity adds is the potential for harassment (not insinuating that this is Matt's intention, only that this is the likely outcome of personal information on the internet in this day and age).
I have no problem with calling out the company. I'd have no problem with the first name even. But the phone number and last name are personally identifying and unnecessarily endanger the representative.
"Unnecessarily endanger the representative"? He didn't set a puppy on fire and post it to 4chan, he sent an embarrassing piece of spam. I don't think the wordpress folks are going to load up in their six-faws[1] and shoot up the guy's house.
If you can't handle it, then don't cold-email people. He did nothing, just published this information (last name blurred, not sure if this was done afterwards) which in itself reveals no private information of any of the parts.
enterprise sales organizations often do research on individual companies or market verticals, add entries into a big list, maybe combined with other marketing/sales people, and then do a mail merge from their CMS or other software.
just because the sender may not have realized this particular corporation was a direct competitor does not mean they didn't do any research on the company or its market.
perhaps sales guy was going through 200 companies that day in a list sorted on website traffic rankings, or annual revenues, or hosting provider, or any number of other bits of info.
anyway, i run a startup, and i partially rely on received cold emails to get an understanding of the marketplace. we've found vendors, competitors, and VARs that we otherwise wouldn't have known existed. sorry, it's just the way it's done.
You are honestly making a case that someone did ANYTHING that resembled research, and still didn't figure out that they made their chief competitor, who is currently doing far better than them?
Sorry, I just can't make that leap. The SERP for 'Automattic' is all that should have been required to move on.
There's no reason why Automattic shouldn't use Drupal if it's the right tool for a particular job. Drupal projects have used Wordpress in the past, Microsoft use Linux servers etc etc.
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
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 ;)
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..
I'm not really sure how many plugins you're running, or even what type of things you're trying to do with your themes, but I work at a web dev company where WordPress is used for 95% of our clients and I haven't run into any issues using the auto updater in years.
"but works hard for a living to make his both ends meet."
I know it's harsh of me to say "It sure doesn't look like a person working hard to make ends meet, if he's just spamming/spraying and praying". But then again I have a hard time justifying obvious spam at all.
Sure, a lot of people can interpret marketing mail and reach out e-mails as spam - but this is not one of those times.
Interesting. This is the very reason I haven't updated any of my plugins or versions of Drupal on my personal site.
I ran an update for the first time and then spent four hours fixing everything it broke. I was so pissed, I decided not to do it again and have already moved off Drupal.
I highly doubt I will use Wordpress either and agree with your take on just spinning up a rails blog project instead.
Thanks Matt. I admire the effort you put forward leading the Wordpress Foundation and Automattic, but I felt like this was so surprising for exactly that reason.
It's particularly silly since anyone that researched dhh for a few minutes would know his very-public stance on Groupon. I can't imagine that they could say or do anything to get him to work there.
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?
I give them props for being honest about the value of cold contacts. Almost anyone who wants to make it as an enterprise service company has to do this.
Sounds like someone on the sales team wasn't informed about Wordpress. The relationship between the WP and Drupal communities is typically very amicable.
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.
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.
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.
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.