Re: Annual Oracle World Database Survey

<Snip>
> The more I've thought about it, the more I expect to receive some
> stupidflashgigantormailclientcrashingspam about six weeks after Oracle
> World.
> I'm tempted to sacrifice a virgin email account as a honeypot to find
> out if this whole "survey" is just email harvesting. Even the best
> anti-spam legislation would probably not protect against "prior
> business relationships."
>
> A bad survey just has that spam smell.
>

<snip>

> The business decision is getting more obvious to me in retrospect.
> Harvest email. Make some useless rah-rah presentation at Oracle
> World. Target-market email. Target-market snail-mail.

Joel - I'm sorry you feel that way. I have followed up with both you and Daniel specifically asking for feedback on the areas you do not like or feel are broken. I've also followed up with the other person that emailed me directly at my Oracle account. I will read and reply to all similar feedback anybody else wants to send me - at mark.townsend_at_oracle.com

In the meantime, the newsgroup has my personal assurance that

1. This is an Oracle survey.
2. We do and will continue to make quite sane and rational product decisions based on the answers.
3. We are not doing this to collect email addresses.

Note that this survey is not new - we have been doing this in person, via paper, in the Oracle World Database campgrounds, for at least the last 8 years (we did go online for the Oracle World attendees last year).

If guilty of anything, I'm only guilty of wanting to get a better representative sample - i.e replies from people that use Oracle but will never get to attend Oracle World in San Francisco. Having spent the first 35 years of my life not being blessed by living and working in the USA, I happen to think that this is important. However, if anybody else feels that the survey is inappropriate, just a poor excuse at stripping email ids, and/or is inherently broken, then by all means simply ignore it. And, if requested, I will withdraw the link totally from OTN. Received on Thu Sep 04 2003 - 22:02:36 CDT