Warmest regards,
--Your best pal Bob

The Drug Pushers

Prilosec is the kind of drug most reps can only dream about. The industry usually considers a drug to be a blockbuster if it reaches a billion dollars a year in sales. In 1998 Prilosec became the first drug in America to reach $5 billion a year. In 2000 it made $6 billion. Prilosec’s success was not the result of a massive heartburn epidemic. It was based on the same principle that drove the success of many other 1990s blockbusters, from Vioxx to Viagra: the restoration of an ordinary biological function that time and circumstance had eroded. In the case of Prilosec, the function was digestion. Many people discovered that the drug allowed them to eat the burritos and curries that their gastrointestinal systems had placed off-limits. So what if Prilosec was $4 a pill, compared with a quarter or so for a Tagamet? Patients still begged for it. Prilosec was their savior. Astra Merck marketed Prilosec as the “purple pill,” but, according to Carbona, many patients called it “purple Jesus.”

How did Astra Merck do it? Prilosec was the first proton pump inhibitor (a drug that inhibits the production of stomach acid) approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and thus the first drug available in its class. By definition this gave it a considerable head start on the competition. In the late 1990s Astra Merck mounted a huge direct-to-consumer campaign; ads for the purple pill were ubiquitous. But consumer advertising can do only so much for a drug, because doctors, not patients, write the prescriptions. This is where reps become indispensable.

Sounds very uncomfortable.

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}

I have to say that I don't really care whether Ruby on Rails succeeds as the future of web development. All I care about it whether it succeeds at what I need it to do. For instance the gigantic, scalable, enterprise grade system at my work is based on Python because it's a nice language to work in and it works well for us.

As a language i'm not a huge fan of Ruby. I find Python a much simpler language to work with, with most of Ruby's sexy features still in place ("Duck Typing" is basically just dynamic binding with a stupid name). I think that the Rails libraries, however, are pretty damn slick.

However, I wish all the Ruby zealots at the office would shut the hell up. I don't care how nice the libraries are, you're going to need a hell of a lot more than Textmate macros to tackle an application as big as ours.

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imagine dancing banana here

I thought everyone got it.

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It's political correctness gone mad!