Daryl, Phil put it very succintly when he wrote
"managers who don't know SQL will sit in meetings with salesmen who don't know SQL, trying to figure out whether Oracle, Informix, Sybase, or DB2 is best."
While a lot of people we sell to are technically challenged, and are happy to have you run the show and make recommendations, you will find the odd manager who wants to stick his finger in the pie so to speak. These people tend to want to display their knowledge (or lack therof). Good or bad, you will find such a manager waxing lyrical about this product or other (because he has read the marketing spiel) and will totally badmouth something like openACS because he does not know a thing about it, and is not really technically competent to evaluate it objectively.
Like they used to say, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. With the right branding, one would be in a position to deal with impossible/ignorant manager by saying "what do you mean you don't know what openACS is?". In fact, if selling the brand is done correctly, these "suits" will be afraid to challenge the openACS least they show their ignorance.
I have a friend who is doing a lot of IT/Oracle consultancy work in South Africa, and he says that the way he swings a lot of deals, is by (subtley of course) telling the managers that choosing his solution will make them look good. 😊
Just my £0.02 worth
