Two points of "sale"

From the recent emails, I felt the need to point out that there are
basically two points at which you can sell Python:

1) At programming project startup.  As in Strakt's case, some managers 
   are open to considering Python; remember many of them know how to 
   program and have some appreciation that tools matter.  There's no magic 
   marketing bullet here, just visibility to people making these 
   decisions.  They might read about Strakt's story (see
   http://pythonology.org/success&story=strakt) and try it.  
   They might have a friend that recommends Python or read about it 
   in a magazine.  All of these matter.

2) As a solution.  *Before* a problem is solved, people are open
   to finding out about ways to solve it.  These people care about
   solving their problem domain -- scientific visualization, managing
   web content, running a factory, etc -- and they want to hear about
   how others have done that.  The language is quite irrelevant.

Selling a programming language only works in (1) and otherwise amounts to
trying to sell a better way to solve an already-solved problem, which is
not very useful, or simply is missing the mark as to what people are
interested in.

Note that (1) is fairly rare as opportunities go:  (2) has much more 
weight (the "killer app" concept).

This might explain why the eGovOS people don't want to hear about
language -- it's already enough of a leap that they want to hear about
OS abstractly, the rest needs to be solution-oriented.

- Stephan