From: martelli@cadlab.sublink.org (Alex Martelli)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: is this appropriate use of usenet?
Date: 14 Oct 92 08:12:49 GMT
Organization: CAD.LAB S.p.A., Bologna, Italia

yoder@austin.ibm.com (Stuart R. Yoder) writes:

:I have a question I been looking for an answer to for a couple of
:days and still can't get anything definite.    The question is:
:is it appropriate to do a product survey -- I work in IBM AIX developement
:and am interested in posting a survey to comp.unix.aix regarding
:customers complaints of AIX, features they would like to see added, how they
:compare us with HP,SUN,DEC,etc, and any other feedback they want to
:give.  Is this appropriate use of Usenet?  I've seen magazines doing
:surveys and students doing surveys -- is it appropriate for a business
:to do a survey about it's own product.

IBM surely has its own policies (speaking as an ex-IBM'er with a lot of
sympathy for IBM, I must say one thing that I NEVER found missing when
in IBM was COMPANY POLICIES!-), which you would be VERY well advised to
heed (the sacking of Larry Salomon of OS/2 fame for "too much helpfulness"
[mailing IUO info, I believe] was just this summer!).

Apart from that, I see surveys ALL the time in comp.sys.$VENDOR groups,
and I find them perfectly appropriate there; for example, very recently
the HP group responsible for the future of their hpterm X11 terminal
emulator posted a survey to comp.sys.hp, and I saw no objections to it
on the group, zilch, zero (hpterm appears to be very little loved, and
if you were to poll about "aixterm" you might get similarly unfavourable
opinions, but then that's a risk implicit in a survey, wouldn't you
say?-).  It's unfortunate that there isn't a comp.sys.ibm.power newsgroup
or something like that (similarly, there is no comp.unix.hpux; how comes
DEC gets both comp.sys.dec AND comp.unix.ultrix, not to speak of all
the Sun-related groups, while IBM and HP don't get similar treatment?
After all they both have greater market share than DEC in the Unix WS
market... but, I digress), but, given that lack (i.e. that ALL discussion
which properly should be in comp.sys.ibm.rs6000 is by default "folded"
into comp.unix.aix), I should deem it perfectly reasonable to post your
survey to comp.unix.aix.

By common net.courtesy, you should ask for e-mail responses, and post a
summary (NOT just a collation!!!) of the answers you receive when they
are all in.  I WOULD judge it unappropriate if you were to withhold these
results from the very net that has "donated" the answers to you!  I
realize this can be awkward, particularly if unlovely things about IBM,
R/6000 boxes, and/or AIX get said, but I would say this is the price to
pay; maybe get a neutral 3rd party to receive and summarize the answers
(as well as forwarding them to you) if you perceive this as problematical.

I would dearly love to have this avenue for feedback to IBM, as well as
all others (so I could ONCE AGAIN ask that !^@%#$!!  semantics of memory
allocation be reversed to get back to NORMAL malloc(), etc, behaviour,
for example!), and so, I'm sure, would many other netters; and just as
interested in seeing the results of such a survey.
-- 
Email: martelli@cadlab.sublink.org                   Phone: ++39 (51) 6130360
CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Ronzani 7/29, Casalecchio, Italia   Fax: ++39 (51) 6130294 
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions