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I wrote this essay in response to an essay by Paul Graham. I certainly recommend reading the original. Despite the general tone of disagreement in my response, I remain a great admirer of Graham’s writings.

Like the previous chapter, this one is a response to somebody else’s work. In this case, I offer my comments about an essay by Joel Spolsky.

Judging from the fan mail I receive, this essay is probably the most popular thing I have ever written. If I had known it was going to become somewhat of a classic, I might have written it more carefully. In my first attempt to write the introduction for this chapter, I started writing all the things I wish I had said when I originally wrote the essay. As the length of the introduction began to approach the length of the chapter itself, I decided to delete it and just leave this piece as it is. Maybe someday I’ll write a sequel called “Career Calculus II.”

(Don’t take this title too strictly. I wrote this article at a time when I was mostly writing about micro-ISVs, but you can certainly apply the concepts here to companies of more than one person.) Some people have lots of time and no ideas. Others have too many ideas to pursue. Life is not fair. In any case, the first step in marketing is finding a product idea. Some ways of approaching this problem are better than others. If this doesn’t seem like marketing, then consider the possibility that your definition of the word marketing needs to be revised.

The next three chapters are a miniseries on fundamental marketing concepts. This one is about product positioning. I wrote it back in June 2003. Since then, it has been very popular. In fact, if you do a Google search on the words product positioning, this article is usually the number-one or number-two result. The log files from my Web server indicate that I consistently get traffic that way, which I have always imagined to be a stream of college students studying marketing. I wonder how many times college professors all over the world have had to tell their students to “ignore that geek from Illinois” and focus on stuff written by the real experts in the field.

This article on competition is the second in my three-chapter mini-series on the fundamentals of marketing. At this point, some pedantic quibbling geek is going to look at the article dates and notice that I actually wrote this chapter before the previous one. Get over it.

The third classical marketing concept is the bell curve, which explains how markets adopt new things. I first learned about this topic from Geoffrey Moore. In fact, I had the privilege of meeting him several years ago. Spyglass flew the entire company to a resort in Arizona for a meeting and hired Moore to be the speaker. He is an even better speaker than writer. But that’s no excuse not to read his books. You must read Crossing the Chasm (Collins, 1991). This bell curve is a really important concept in marketing strategy, and I have only scratched the surface of the topic.

The previous four articles were about topics that geeks need to learn in order to do marketing. The next two are about topics that geeks need to unlearn. You see, as geeks, we are bad at marketing not merely because of our ignorance of classical marketing concepts such as positioning but also because of a natural tendency to do things wrong. We like technology far too much to make objective decisions without conscious effort.

We geeks tend to develop religious beliefs about platforms and technologies. We love Windows, and we hate Linux. Or we love MacOS, and we hate Windows. Or whatever. In fact, because of one of these religious wars, I had trouble getting this article published. When I originally submitted this piece to my editors at MSDN, they objected to one sentence: Linux is cool. The folks at MSDN weren’t arguing whether Linux was cool. They simply didn’t want that sentence appearing in an article on their Web site. I eventually understood their perspective. Many readers of my MSDN column never noticed that I was not a Microsoft employee. The sentence was begging to be taken out of context and published in a Slashdot article entitled “Microsoft says Linux is cool.” It’s the irony of this situation that still makes me laugh. Platform wars prevented me from publishing an article about the evils of platforms wars. (This situation does fit the definition of irony, right? Ever since that Alanis Morissette song brought out all the language pedants, I’m never sure what’s irony and what’s not.) Anyway, I put the offending sentence back in. I’m sure you’ll agree the article is much better this way.

In this final chapter on the strategic side of marketing, I return to the topic of competition. When this article was originally published on my weblog, most of the feedback I received was positive, but one person described it as “the longest blog post ever.” Taking mild offense at this remark, I decided to find a longer one and then quibble with him. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a longer blog post anywhere. Anyway, this chapter is long, but it’s fairly whimsical.