Since my last column, some fairly surprising but very positive things have happened. Those of you with time to read more than just this excellent newspaper may have seen the editors column in the Spectrum magazine. Gus Giobbi wrote about being "mad as hell" about the current lack of market recognition for the Pick database. While the detail of his suggested solutions were slightly different than my proposals, his description of the causes of this "marketing disaster" was nearly identical to mine – "past personality conflicts… legal squabbles… and a market fractionated by so many derivative products under so many different names … that it has ended up with no effective marketing clout."

In general, his approach was so similar to my last two columns that I was almost ready to accuse him of stealing my ideas. But its OK Gus, the whole point is to stimulate involvement. He believes the solution is to create a unifying theme that will allow us to show the rest of the world the true size and scope of the Pick marketplace. A marketplace by his estimates of about 3+ billion (yes billion) dollars a year in software solutions. While he also despairs of the vendors and VARs ever solving this problem on their own, Gus was very positive in his belief that the whole community would readily embrace and rally around a unifying symbol which he proposes to champion.

To be honest, when I read his column and tried to evaluate the approach, I thought he had a pretty good idea but would likely have the same problems gaining acceptance with the vendors and VARs as I foresaw for my user success stories approach. Everyone would love it in theory, but when the money had to leave the bank account there would be a mass exodus of support. After all, the tone of the story was clearly this was a "unilateral" attempt at creating a viable market wide symbol, such as the "Intel inside" or the Dolby sound system symbol of excellence. The success of these marketing efforts was clearly based on much, much tighter control of the community than we will ever see in the Pick arena.

As I’m a member of the Technical Advisory Board that met with Spectrum the middle of February to discuss this, I received a little more information than was in the Gus’s original column. For starters, he has already polled the hardware and software vendors and is receiving much more positive feedback than I expected. They have even begun pledging some financial backing to the new symbol which I find nothing short of startling. I guess I had better upgrade my option of these vendors – maybe they do understand where they make their money after all. The large VARs were even more enthusiastic, and just like my own responses, Gus received numerous favorable end user comments as well. It seems most if not everyone is downright eager to have better recognition for the Pick data model, even if we don’t end-up calling it "Pick".

I suppose I should have seen that one coming – too many people associate the name with the errors of the past. After a short discussion they convinced even me that in order for this to fly, we couldn’t use the word "Pick" to describe it. Perhaps its my history or maybe I’m just nostalgic but I for one still wish we could proudly call it Pick. And I’ve been wishing that for the better part of the last 20 years.

My thanks to you Gus, for picking up the banner with me and trying to wave it high again. The ease of use of the whatchamacallit data model and the sophisticated applications using it have gone unrecognized for way too long. I still feel the secret for a quantum leap in marketing lies outside the current user base but perhaps if the vendors, and the VARs, the programmers and the end users do ultimately get together and support this initiative we can at least kick-start the marketing of whatchamacallit to the rest of the DP world.

If any of these ideas have appeal, please write me, Spectrum, or News and Review and help us refine the plan. See you at the show March 11th -14th. Until then, simply imagine how large an impact we could have had 15 years ago if we all sported "Pick inside" logos and worked, really worked, as a team to promote the database! On second thought, that’s so large its scary. Instead, let’s think about what we can accomplish from here on out – not as large perhaps, but still something well worth working on.