🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec17.195300.4758@news2.cis.umn.edu> davidli@simvax.labmed.umn.edu writes:
>Personally, if *I* arranged a meeting with people at Atari, and *I* spent my
>own funds to get there to demonstrate a software package, *I* would want to
>call the shots as to who *I* wanted to talk with ... and if Atari decided that
>the appropriate people to speak with were, to me, inappropriate, I would have
>told them so.

And if *you* were Bill Gates meeting with IBM about MS-DOS, *you*
wouldn't have allowed yourself to be jerked around so much or signed
such a binding agreement with them -- *you* would have walked out and
blown the deal upon which an empire was built.

The simple fact is that when you're trying to sell something to a much
larger company, you do it on their terms rather than blow the deal, 
regardless of what those terms might be.  In a perfect world, an
enterprising small company with a good product would be on equal
bargaining ground with a large computer company.  But it doesn't
work that way in practice.

Besides all that, we were told that we'd be meeting with the
"Falcon Game Devlopment Team."  Seemed logical enough to us.  We
had no reason to expect the irrational spectacle we encountered,
and therefore had no reason to be paranoid.

>Of course, all *I* was wondering in my posting was what the hell LYNX
>programmers were doing in a meeting discussing a set of Atari ST/Falcon
>programming libraries.  [How Atari can feel that people who sit at Amigas all
>day programming for hand-held game machines are capable of programming games
>for the Falcon is beyond me...]

And, as you answered for yourself, it's because we were too stupid to
make sure the right people would be in the meeting.  Our fault.
Right?

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
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