View From the Bushes

There's a "programmer" here at work who I went out to lunch with the other day. This particular person had been bugging me for months for an interview. Initially he said that he needed it for a class he was taking over at the community college, but even after the class was over he still wanted to talk to me. Finally after putting him off for as long as possible I told him that if he bought me lunch I'd talk to him. When we get to lunch it turns out that he wants my advice on setting up on on-line business. He evidently had not seen DireKobold, or perhaps he was looking for a cautionary tale.

Well after he announced that he wanted to sell stuff online I asked him what he wanted to sell. "Electronics: DVD players, TV/VCR's, that sort of thing." Now if you didn't know the guy you might think that he was looking to fence stolen merchandise, but this guy is as boring a four hour meeting with marketing (see my April 22nd entry). So I ask him why someone would go to his site rather then going to BestBuy or something similar. He says, "I don't know. I haven't figured that part out yet. I figured I'd have a lower overhead." "Possibly", I concede, "but a big company can go to Sony and say we're going to buy a million DVD players and generally get a pretty good price. Do you even have a way to get your stuff for less than retail?" "Costco? Sam's Club?"

The sad thing is that as bad as his business plan was his programming knowledge was even worse. When I asked him what languages he was considering he said he had heard of Perl but he wanted to know what CGI was. When I talked to him about having a database backend that could be populated straight from the webpage he was amazed. "I thought the only thing you could do with a form was have it e-mail stuff to you." But the real kicker was when he mentioned that his plan was to go to people's sites that did e-commerce, click "View Source" and just use their code. I know this whole thing comes across as really mean, but I totally sympathize with the guy. All of his programming skills are 20 years old (Cobol, VMS, etc.) and he knows the time of their obsolesce is fast approaching, what better way to stay current then to latch on to something hip and cutting edge like DireKobold?

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross