re: #684 darthstar

I patronize the many local mom-n-pop shops when I can. I have also done lots of free IT work for some of them. The thing I notice most is that although they are generally experts at the business they’re in, they also don’t seem to have the slightest idea how to advertise themselves. They waste all kinds of money taking out ads in shitty little publications that are read by probably 15 people, in a metro area of 6+ million. And invariably, they get personally offended if you suggest a better strategy.

I’ve noticed there’s also a tendency among business owners who are not very technically savvy to believe that a piece of custom-designed software (invariably written by some fly-by-night ‘company’ that you’ve never heard of before and will never hear of again) that costs $800 and pisses them off daily is superior to and more ‘trustworthy’ than an open source equivalent that can be easily tweaked to fit their preferences, at a cost of $0.00.