steve kwan user experience designer

Software is a drug that we can't live without

(January 23rd, 2008 - 9:34AM)

I've listened to a lot of people talk software sales strategy, and one thing I find amusing is how often software is related to drugs.

Over my career I've heard the following (paraphrased) ideas bounced around:

"Our product is like heroin. All we need to do is get the junkies to shoot it into their veins once, and then we have them hooked for life."

"We need to find a way to get people to try our product out, sort of like how drug dealers hang around schools and give crack to six-year-olds."

I find this terribly amusing for a variety of reasons - the main one being that, of all the metaphors you could make for software sales, why would you choose to equate it to drugs?