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--></style></head><body lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div class="WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">Hahaha spot on there!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> </span></p><div><div style="border:none;border-top:solid #b5c4df 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif""> <a href="mailto:ausnog-bounces@lists.ausnog.net">ausnog-bounces@lists.ausnog.net</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:ausnog-bounces@lists.ausnog.net">ausnog-bounces@lists.ausnog.net</a>] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Bevan Slattery<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, March 06, 2013 10:41 PM<br><b>To:</b> Mark Newton<br><b>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:ausnog@lists.ausnog.net">ausnog@lists.ausnog.net</a><br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [AusNOG] IPv6: "Objections to sale"</span></p>
</div></div><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><div><p class="MsoNormal">I think IPV6 is more like the 5 stages of grief.</p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"> </p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:".HelveticaNeueUI","serif""><a href="http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/">http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/</a></span></p>
</div><div><p class="MsoNormal"> </p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:".HelveticaNeueUI","serif"">I skipped steps 3 & 4 :)</span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal">
</p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:".HelveticaNeueUI","serif"">B<br></span><br>Sent from my iPhone</p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">
<br>On 06/03/2013, at 6:51 PM, Mark Newton <<a href="mailto:newton@atdot.dotat.org">newton@atdot.dotat.org</a>> wrote:</p></div><blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt"><div><p class="MsoNormal">Sales people go through a series of stages to convince a customer to buy.<br>
<br>The first stage is to establish a rapport, so that the salesperson is seen as a <br>trustworthy and credible voice. Pretty much impossible to sell anything high-value<br>if you can't do that. So that's why salespeople have big expense accounts, spend<br>
a lot of time at expensive restaurants, invite customers to golf courses, and hand<br>out promotional toys: It's all about setting themselves up as your friend.<br><br>In the process of doing that, they gain enough info to move on to the second stage,<br>
which is to identify specific problems you have and products in their portfolio<br>which could solve them. Thus begins the pitch...<br><br>Even if the pitch is successful, and they've convinced you that they have a product<br>
that you ought to buy, you're not going to sign on the dotted line until you've been<br>through the third stage, which is overcoming your "objections to sale." <br><br>Perhaps you don't like the price; the salesperson will negotiate on that. Maybe there's<br>
a feature $competitor has which you like; the salesperson will either show you their<br>equivalent features, or try to convince you that $competitor's feature is buggy or<br>unnecessary. Maybe you don't have budget the salesperson either comes back when<br>
you're working out next FY, or gives you an offer you can't refuse to induce you to<br>buy immediately.It's an iterative process, where one by one the reasons you'd have for<br>not spending money are worn down.<br>
<br>At the end you have an identified need, a product to fill it, no reason not to buy<br>the product, and a natural human inclination to want to make your friend happy.<br>All the psychological boxes ticked, you make the sale. The magic of capitalism.<br>
<br>The good salespeople execute the stages in parallel, but even then you can pick<br>the progression if you're looking for it. They're basically coin-operated humans,<br>all running variants of the same software :-)<br>
<br>We're all going through something similar with IPv6. The first stage is pretty <br>straightforward, it was accommodated years ago by people like Geoff Huston banging<br>the drum (it was his RIPE talk about IPv4 allocations increasing in geometric time<br>
instead of exponential time that got Internode into the game. I think I still<br>have the email message I sent to Simon about it sitting in my sent folder!)<br><br>The second stage is pretty straightforward too: IPv4 disappearing. Some of<br>
you don't believe it is disappearing half as quickly as everyone has made it out<br>to be, but even those people would be dishonest if they didn't at least acknowledge<br>the legitimacy of the case. No IPv4 + availability of IPv6 = problem + solution.<br>
<br>So now we're up to stage 3: Objections to sale.<br><br>Back in 2003, people said things like, "Router support is terrible and buggy." Then<br>the router vendors basically fixed that one, and it's now next to impossible to buy<br>
business-oriented routing hardware that doesn't do reliable IPv6, and even some<br>of the cheap consumer gear is doing it now too. Tick the box, move on.<br><br>Back in 2005, there were policy objections: "I can't get PI space from my RIR,"<br>
or, "This is stupid, am I seriously supposed to give 4 billion times more addresses<br>than the entire IPv4 Internet to every Ethernet segment?" The RIRs came to the<br>party with that one, policies were changed, education was delivered. Perhaps the<br>
IPv6 Forum played a part here, but so did "buzz."<br><br>In 2007 it was, "I can't get IPv6 from my upstream." Solved. In almost any<br>geography on the planet you can now buy native dual-stack transit from lots of<br>
suppliers.<br><br>In 2008 we had objections like, "My load balancers don't support it." "My<br>firewalls don't support it." None of them were good reasons to do nothing at all,<br>they were merely good reasons to leave the bits behind the firewalls and load<br>
balancers on IPv4. Solved problem now, lots of options, if your vendor doesn't do what<br>you need or tries to charge extra for v6 you can just tell them that you'll never<br>buy another thing from them again for as long as your company lives unless they<br>
deliver, and make purchasing decisions appropriately thereafter.<br><br>In 2009 the big message was, "Can't do it, it's expensive." Well, no. It isn't.<br>It might be under a pretty small number of specific deployment modes, but experience<br>
shows there are plenty of other deployment modes where it doesn't need to be<br>expensive at all, even for networks larger than yours. Totally optional problem,<br>you get to choose whether or not it applies to you, if you think this is important<br>
just choose differently and get happy. We've all known this for years, entire <br>conferences have been held to emphasise it.<br><br>In 2010 it was, "I can't connect my eyeballs." I like to think Internode played<br>
a none-too-small part in solving that one. Vendor support is there, the features<br>are available at both the BRAS end and the CPE end for anyone who wants them. Done<br>and dusted.<br><br>So let's look at where we are today:<br>
<br>One by one, reasons for not doing IPv6 have been knocked down. The original reasons<br>for doing it still exist. They're actually worse now because APNIC has run out<br>and new addresses are expensive on the open market. All the predictions are coming<br>
true.<br><br>But there are still objections to sale.<br><br>The difference between the previous objections and the current ones, though is <br>the triviality of the latter.<br><br>We're actually down to, "I'm not doing IPv6 because I can't make the phones work<br>
without IPv4."<br><br>Seriously? Is that it?<br><br>We geeks like to see technical solutions to problems, and that's the way we've<br>approached this so far. Each technical objection to sale has been beaten to death<br>
by technical hammers, the state of play is so much better than it was ten years ago<br>that it's not funny. Anyone who patiently explained why they weren't proceeding in<br>2003 has certainly had every single last one of their issues dealt with in the <br>
intervening decade.<br><br>But we geeks are also sometimes blind to non-technical issues, and I think I'm<br>starting to see what's going on here. I think there is actually a major<br>non-technical reason holding back progress in this area:<br>
<br>You don't want to do it.<br><br>That's it. It's that simple. It explains why you aren't messing around with it<br>at home like you did with Linux boxes in the late 1990's. It explains why there's<br>
so much butthurt about the price of IPv4, given that you aren't visualizing a future<br>when IPv4 is considered obsolete. It explains why you so desperately want to<br>believe that it's hard and expensive and mysterious and impossible, despite the<br>
availability of so many people who've actually done it and tell you the complete<br>opposite. It explains why someone like Don can say, "[complexity] is exactly<br>the stuff that's driving SMB geeks away," even though a defining attribute of being<br>
a geek ever since Michelangelo dreamed of helicopters has been that they'll be <br>energised and turned on my complexity. It's why when the phones work on IPv6<br>you'll say you still can't deploy it because the MIT CoffeeCam is still on IPv4.<br>
It's why it's 2013 and you haven't even deployed in in the lab. It's why Bevan<br>will donate $50k on training, and at the end of it half of you will use your <br>newfound expertise and insight to figure out new reasons to not do it[1].<br>
<br>You just don't want to do it.<br><br>Now, I'm not being judgmental about that choice. It's as valid as any other. We<br>all place limitations in our lives around the things we want to get involved in and<br>
the things we don't, it's normal human behavior.<br><br>But I think we need to stop crapping on about technology and complexity, and <br>perhaps be a bit honest about what's going on here. The technical objections<br>
that are being raised are proxies for something more fundamental and psychological.<br>We can play whack-a-mole with them for as long as we like and it won't change<br>the reason underlying all of it: There are some people on this list who, to <br>
varying extents, have adopted v6 already, and there are others here who,<br>consciously or otherwise, will try every trick in the book to avoid doing it.<br><br>We eat, sleep, live and breath complexity. We use all manner of scripting <br>
languages, databases, network devices, operating systems, routing protocols,<br>arcane stuff that the typical person in the street (or Whirlpool nick) can't<br>ever hope to understand. A lot of what we do doesn't work very well, and <br>
we apply effort towards making it work better. Very few of us have ever used<br>"The implementation sucks!" as a reason for not doing something that needed to<br>be done.<br><br>We all earn our livelihoods from managing this complexity.<br>
<br>But not with IPv6.<br><br>Have any of you applied enough introspection to figure out why this particular<br>piece of internet technology, among all others, is the one that you don't seen<br>to want to touch?<br><br>
<br> - mark<br><br><br><br>[1] Thank you, Bevan -- the gesture is a worthy one regardless, even if only<br> for the remaining half who will benefit from it.<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>AusNOG mailing list<br>
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