Epilogue: Drupal too powerful to show potential clients

Yesterday I demo'd a bare Drupal install, because it was the only one I felt like messing around in, and the potential client was really pushing for a demo to show him the back-end. Drupal doesn't really have a backend, most all of what you want to do . Not having his full requirements, let alone a site built to them, I showed off the parts of Drupal we use to actually build sites– you enable a module and get new functionality, here's how you create a new content type in CCK, etc. Images and actions speak louder than words, so my repeated explanations that his team would never have to do any of this stuff, or even see it, if they didn't want to (but isn't it nice to have the potential of understanding how your software works?) fell on deaf ears. The result, although still very interested at the end of the demo, was after thinking about it a day, the conclusion that Drupal is too powerful and therefore complex for his needs.

My conclusion: Agaric Design Collective needs to make sure I don't talk to people, and don't ever give someone a general demo when they're looking for a specific need. (In particular when, like most of our clients so far – and this is surprising considering how hot Drupal is – the people don't care if we use Drupal or drywall as long as their site does what they want.) Agaric knew both of these things already, but it helps to remind ourselves. Still, it's a little hard when you're a young company and every site has been amazingly unique in purpose, audience, and user/presenter to simply make a copy of the closest site and say here, does this do what you want? Every project has been completely different. The closest to his needs (business showcase) was done in Drupal 4.7, and we didn't want to demo that, because we at Agaric are bigoted ageists when it comes to Drupal versions.

(He'll probably be back, if I didn't make it a matter of "admit you're wrong, Drupal will take over the world" in my parting note. Virtually everyone who's contacted us has, one way or another. The pull of Drupal is too strong for a bad demonstration to stop it!)

Came across this just now and thought it was a fitting epilogue, emphasis added:

http://smokinggoat.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/coming-at-us-like-a-bunch-of-belgians/

People don’t want to spend their time learning how to build a website, even if the tool is fairly easy to learn and even easier to use, and may never require a line of code. It’s just not their job - their job is teaching, or feeding the hungry, or advocating for the environment. Every mechanic will tell you that maintaining your own car is easy - heck, maintaining your bike is easy…. But we still need -nay, we still demand car (and bike) mechanics. Because in the end it’s another skill set we don’t want to learn. So I don’t think Drupal will kill off web site developers like Amazon killed off bookstores (a snarky example of Internet change as described by Dries), but it will sure kill of proprietary CMS companies, and the secondary industries that have sprung up around them (see WebEx, SharePoint, and maybe even Raiser’sEdge down the road?)

Resolution