The Redhat of Drupal
ma.tt
ma.tt
Yes it's foolish to cold email someone like that but it seems petty and unnecessary to put this person "on blast" as it were.
I especially loved this bit: "I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. "
What a bold faced lie! Obviously he didn't spend even 2 seconds researching anything related to Automattic. Acquia harvested Matt's information and spammed him, and they deserve to be called out.
He could've made the point just as well while omitting personal information. The only value the identity adds is the potential for harassment (not insinuating that this is Matt's intention, only that this is the likely outcome of personal information on the internet in this day and age).
I have no problem with calling out the company. I'd have no problem with the first name even. But the phone number and last name are personally identifying and unnecessarily endanger the representative.
Edit: Also, he's right here -- full name and picture, even -- on Acquia's own public site: http://www.acquia.com/about-us/team/dillon-vassallo
No, that's not an excuse. Having to make a living is not a free pass to be a douche[1] to strangers with impunity.
1: And the lies - "I was researching" which then makes "I'm sorry for the cold email" a second lie - makes him a douche.
Too much political correctness can be bad.
If you can't handle it, then don't cold-email people. He did nothing, just published this information (last name blurred, not sure if this was done afterwards) which in itself reveals no private information of any of the parts.
enterprise sales organizations often do research on individual companies or market verticals, add entries into a big list, maybe combined with other marketing/sales people, and then do a mail merge from their CMS or other software.
just because the sender may not have realized this particular corporation was a direct competitor does not mean they didn't do any research on the company or its market.
perhaps sales guy was going through 200 companies that day in a list sorted on website traffic rankings, or annual revenues, or hosting provider, or any number of other bits of info.
anyway, i run a startup, and i partially rely on received cold emails to get an understanding of the marketplace. we've found vendors, competitors, and VARs that we otherwise wouldn't have known existed. sorry, it's just the way it's done.
Sorry, I just can't make that leap. The SERP for 'Automattic' is all that should have been required to move on.
this is the world you are helping to build.
I've always heard this as bald-faced lie.
And my advice to Matt - It's a great offer, Wordpress is so FUCKED UP right now, worse than drupal that I wouldn't be surprised if this was even sent on purpose. (Try working out pagination for static pages, you will notice there are two GET variables ($page and $paged) for the same functionality (example of inconsistency) or try updating your Wordpress to the recent version AFTER a couple of months and tell me if it doesn't break your theme or plugin. They depreciate so many functions randomly, rename them unnecessarily, etc.)
If I wanted a blog engine right now, my solution right now would be:
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
If you have specific examples of compatibility breaking changes we have made recently that caused you issues I would love to know about them so we can address them.
I agreed that $page and $paged can be confusing - being able to both be on a page within a single item of content or on page X of the stream of blog items means we need two different variables - yes they could have better names but changing them would be backwards incompatible ;)
I ran an update for the first time and then spent four hours fixing everything it broke. I was so pissed, I decided not to do it again and have already moved off Drupal.
I highly doubt I will use Wordpress either and agree with your take on just spinning up a rails blog project instead.
I know it's harsh of me to say "It sure doesn't look like a person working hard to make ends meet, if he's just spamming/spraying and praying". But then again I have a hard time justifying obvious spam at all.
Sure, a lot of people can interpret marketing mail and reach out e-mails as spam - but this is not one of those times.
"is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web"
I'm this, this, this, also, I'm rich and I like to burn people publicly because I can
Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam:
http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/
Follow up:
http://waxy.org/2005/04/wordpress_follo/
Matt's Response:
Thanks Matt. I admire the effort you put forward leading the Wordpress Foundation and Automattic, but I felt like this was so surprising for exactly that reason.
Keep making great software amigo.
This is how it should be done, imho of course.
It sure reads like "we got caught with our hands in the cookie jar", well, that's why you get a PR company.
Also: "but he shouldn’t have posted the contact details of our Acquia business development rep. Hoping he takes it down, immediately"
Thumbs up for not being passive-agressive about it, now be a man and ask him directly. You have his email address after all
There has been a lot of discussion within the Drupal community about Acquia and how asphyxiating their presence is for the ecosystem, both on technical (direction of the actual project) and business levels (cannibalization of all the sales).
I think it's perfectly fine they do so and wish them all the success they can have with this, but their public stance is always very defensive of doing so.
I think Matt did a good job here. He didn't ignore it and dismissed it in a nice way.