RE: Mini Survey: Who uses XML?

["France Baril" <France -dot- Baril -at- ixiasoft -dot- com>]

First, our company's market is not end customers, we do not target the
companies who produce documentation. We target people who build
solutions for those who produce documentation, so if my goal was to get
customers out of a survey, I would post on an integrator site and ask
who they produce the doc for.

Second, it is true that our market is partly made of tech writers,
however, as I am not in marketing, I do not have access to information
about companie's size, how many tech writers they have and their reason
for going xml. I could ask my question to marketing as it's true that if
we have been around for so long, we probably have access to a customer
bank though our integrators somewhere. But then, I would have to call
each integrator to know the kind of application they build for each kind
of customer and how many of these are for technical publications... I
thought asking here was more efficient. Especially since our product is
used a lot for other things than technical publications and as a tech
writer, that's what I am interested in.

And information will not be kept confidential, I said will compile
results by the end of the week for all our competitors to read. Do you
think I would do that if I wanted to keep it for myself to get to some
big market?

I'm sure we can find tones of arguments for each side, especially since
a lot of companies have some aggressive marketing campains, we know from
all the junk we receive to our inboxes. So, I guess you just have to
take my word for it. If you are afraid we are going to end up calling
you as a result of this survey, just don't answer.




-----Original Message-----
From: John Posada [mailto:JPosada -at- isogon -dot- com] 
Sent: January 12, 2004 3:46 PM
To: France Baril; TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: Mini Survey: Who uses XML?


France...I think you are missing my point.  You work for an XML solution
vendor. This is EXACTLY the types of questions that vendor's use to
solicit leads. Suppose my response was that my company has 1,000 writers
and that we don't use XML. I shouldn't be concerned that my company is
not going to get passed to your marketing department...with the pitch
that "XML can increase our efficiency by 75%, thereby reducing the
amount of writers needed to perform the same results by 750 heads?"

Are you telling me that even though you work for a vendor of XML
solutions, you "..only hear about a few people using it."? That doesn't
say much for your company.

At the minimum, you should have included a disclaimer in your message
that it was for your own information and that all information would be
kept confidential.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
Isogon Corporation
http://www.isogon.com