Quote:
Originally Posted by Feydakin
He won't do email marketing.. He considers it all worthless spam  |
That's not entirely true - I accept that email marketing has commercial value, even the spam in fact (just quite low conversion rates other than if you are re-targeting people who already buy from you).
The main reason I wouldn't do it is that it is not really a software challenge - if I want to write software for email marketing I can set it up very easily, I can set up anything like that easily - eg even fully spammic address harvesters and more. However what I am looking to do is to use my broad software skills for creating far richer tools and objects than a mail-sending system!
Also, there is a lot of existent software for sending mail and to be quite honest ANYONE with any server-admin skills knows that on every single platform used as a server it takes about 3 minutes to learn how to send emails from within the system - you can use just about any mode of execution, from commands running at the system level to scripts written to run from commandline execution, scheduled internal execution or web-based execution... it's not at all difficult, it can't really be very profitable and as others have pointed out, it does endanger you of being perceived as a low element of society!
My focus will probably be on educational and cognitive software, to help people learn languages, produce business plans, sales pitches, university essays, in fact I'd love to re-engage myself with that sort of tool (I have made many such tools using perl, primarily, as a hobby, over the years) and try and build it for the latest Vista version and indeed for whatever is (no doubt very soon) going to replace OS X.
I think that building applications which power strong research and analysis will be the niche I go into and try and become the leading provider within.
I could build email sending and spamming systems when I was about 22, after learning perl for only a few months! If I wanted, right now, I could be harvesting and sending spam email about a million times a day... however, my mate the ISP owner would slap me on the wrists and say "Shams, you are a bad man, you must clean up your act", and he'd be right. But then he's one of the leading, most notable ISP creators in britain - he built an amazing ISP which won awards, but his business partner (also a "friend" of mine) (whom I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw him) (and he's pretty short and I expect I could throw him pretty far) sold out and sold it off to a big corporation who bastardized and ruined it all... alas. The partner had set it up using a third person who was his puppet, thus giving himself majority control - sadly his only skills are in p.r. and gloss, so instead of becoming a backend guru he became very front-end - he can make things pretty on the web, but he's no techie, it's too uncool for him.
I won't sell porn or gambling either - however I have found a potential business partner who will create such institutions online using my money and my backing and my experience and intelligence to power the venture. He already has the kind of standing that would keep all competitors in that business at bay.
The other reason I think email marketing is a savage waste of any kind of programming skills is that you send out 1000s and 1000s of bits of info each day, and you get very little back per piece of info. I think it belongs in the world of aggressive sales and marketing and as such I do feel it is definitely immoral even when it's NOT a genuine form of spam - I think opt-in emails and newsletters are an unnecessary form of information dispersal - if someone wants to keep regularly informed, I think that going to a web-page is a better model - after all, everyone knows that clicking "opt-out" of real spam is a way to opt-in to even more spam, so therefore the so-called 'opt-out' you get on non-spam isn't really going to be used properly - I don't bother opting out of ANYTHING, whether I think i opted in or not.
Generally though email marketers are quite a lot less talented than people who know how to make money without wasting SO MUCH BANDWIDTH. I know much better programmers and sys-admin people than me who would gladly have all email marketers shot and anyone who lets their server get hijacked by email spammers sent to a prison colony on mars. I think it's a BIT overly punitive, but I can see why he would feel that way.
