Is there, in fact, a Linux training market out there?

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Mark Lane <lmlane-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> 1) *is* there a linux training market out there and ...
>>
>> 2) if there is, has it already been claimed by the big vendors so that
>> there's nothing left for anyone else?

I suspect that you're right in thinking that this sort of training has
been claimed by the big vendors.  There's a fair chance, as well, that
training courses are a Giffen good, or similar.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good>

No doubt there's a "golf effect" involved with this:

 - The big vendors have salescritters that play golf with CTOs and the like
 - It's an attractive idea for CTOs to announce standardization of
training policies.
   It encourages golf-related shenanigans.
 - This adds together to a tendency for the folks high up in large
organizations to
   standardize on dealing with Big Training Orgs.  (Learning Tree is a
specialized
   example, but vendors like IBM and Oracle are also big on this.)

This leaves cheaper options in a free-fall where they're not valued
*at all* by the sorts of decision makers that have Real Money to throw
at training.

There are "horns of dilemma" here...

- If you offer training services cheap, this validates the assumption
that it's not worth anything.

- If you try to offer training services at a dear price, well, since
you haven't sales deals in place, you won't succeed at selling
training to anyone, and you're back at "not worth anything."

This isn't encouraging, but I expect it's more useful to get realism
than to do the "cargo cult if we build it they will come" thing.
Field of Dreams may have been filled with pithy quotes, but the wish
fulfillment aspect was mighty nonsensical.

> Well at least your lug meetings get turnouts so you can practise. I was
> getting same 4 people every week and that was it. People talked about
> helping but it rarely happened. I guess it's time to schedule another
> meeting and see if any more shows.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
different results.”
-- Albert Einstein

There's a valid place to think that keeping up supporting something
can allow people to start trusting that it will continue, thereby
allowing it to become successful.

But absent of some particularly good reason to expect different
results, it doesn't seem very sane to me to keep trying something that
didn't work before.
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