(no subject)
Dec. 15th, 2005 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingScott Adams is now a walking case study in progressive marketing-based insanity.
Consider his take on the "intelligent design" issue last month, where, without bothering to actually educate himself on the issue, he looked merely at the marketing material and made the decision that both sides obviously had strong marketing, and hence were equally valid.
Now he's attempting to "disprove" the fact that widespread music downloading has increased music sales by offering his amateurish, flawed, and facile grade-school philosophy book for free, and then, as "proof", citing that very few people have bought the sequel from his website directly.
He ignores, of course, that the book isn't a very interesting read, isn't the material that made him famous and attracts his fans, contains casually visible flaws to anyone who has actually learned anything about what he discusses, and the sequel is available through all kinds of methods that aren't his website and he hasn't included any possible sales from there in his numbers. No, he got hundreds of thousands of downloads of a free PDF from his massively popular personal sales platform, and as long as every single one of those downloads didn't result in the sale of a paper copy, music sharing has *not* led to an increase in music sales.
This argument, like the ones in the book, is really, really hard to deal with, mostly because it gets *so little* right and begs so many questions that it's virtually impossible to know where to begin in deconstructing it.
Consider his take on the "intelligent design" issue last month, where, without bothering to actually educate himself on the issue, he looked merely at the marketing material and made the decision that both sides obviously had strong marketing, and hence were equally valid.
Now he's attempting to "disprove" the fact that widespread music downloading has increased music sales by offering his amateurish, flawed, and facile grade-school philosophy book for free, and then, as "proof", citing that very few people have bought the sequel from his website directly.
He ignores, of course, that the book isn't a very interesting read, isn't the material that made him famous and attracts his fans, contains casually visible flaws to anyone who has actually learned anything about what he discusses, and the sequel is available through all kinds of methods that aren't his website and he hasn't included any possible sales from there in his numbers. No, he got hundreds of thousands of downloads of a free PDF from his massively popular personal sales platform, and as long as every single one of those downloads didn't result in the sale of a paper copy, music sharing has *not* led to an increase in music sales.
This argument, like the ones in the book, is really, really hard to deal with, mostly because it gets *so little* right and begs so many questions that it's virtually impossible to know where to begin in deconstructing it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 11:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 11:25 pm (UTC)"Let's do a market analysis to discover how to make our market strategy."
"What they want is better products for free."
"Oh. ... Then let's sell them what we've got and call that our strategy."
If only Adams understood his own advice!
This from the guy who first discovered the Internet could be used as a tool to grow awareness of his product. I wonder if he realizes that by making his comic strip available for free, it prompts people to buy the collected books?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 11:42 pm (UTC)Suddenly, the reason he spent years in a dull, demoralising, time consuming job: so he didn't have the time or energy to produce this kind of tosh.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-16 12:50 am (UTC)