DIR 11 yrs. in the big making
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Soggy
Contributor
He got banned for overuse of the term ad hominem.
He got banned!!
Shame I say, it used to make me laugh when i read his posts, I could never work out if he was serious or not.
Nothing against either organization, but you are comparing apples to oranges. One organization says diving is for everyone and if you pay you can dive and the other organization is very selective about who they allow to train and even more selective about who they certify. One organization wants to be (and is) the biggest dive certification company in the world and the other would rather remain small, nimble, and more focused.
And the discussion comes full circle. If PADI wasn't as big as it is many of us most likely would not even be divers .... DIR followership would be even smaller than it is today .... GUE would be smaller and might never have started due to lack of support.
I know this is a woulda, coulda, shoulda type argument but the point is both philosophies have their place in the industry. If the only choice was DIR type philosophy, the industry would be much, much smaller .... of that there is no doubt.
I think there is a distinction to be made.
PADI (actually "reacreational" training but we'll say PADI becuase you started with it) is not *diver* education in any sort of pure form. PADI is in the tourist trade (a much bigger and much different market than pure diver education) and they are teaching tourists how to go underwater safely. That's called "opening up the undersea realm" (begs the question -- to whom???)
You can see what I'm talking about in the stats. Most divers don't dive much--i.e. on vacations-- and most OW divers never go any further. There's nothing wrong with this in my mind. Someone who dives a few times in their life has had a few unique and wonderful experiences. Some may stop because (avoidable or not) they don't think it's fun but most probably move on to other things after it gets repetative. IN any case, I hear a lot of moaning about PADI that basically comes back to this point. Diving is a tourist industry, 90% of divers are tourists and that's not going to change.
Of course a many PADI trained divers will also become "divers" and some PADI divers even become exceptional divers. Often times it involves taking courses from elsewhere -- read technical agencies -- to learn skills and techniques that may be irrelevant for the underwater tourist but are highly relevant to people wanting to perfect their skills or get more out of their diving.
Enter DIR. DIR brought "tek-like" skills to the masses with DIR-F and some public information that was *finally* written for the layman (like JJ's book). The internet got the word out and the "divers" among us gave it a collective double-take. Suddenly PADI divers who may have been feeling hindered or insecure in their skills had a way to get something that looks like "tek" style training without going tek. Even the gear looks tek. The people giving the courses are all tek. It had the smell of fresh rubber, it looked cool, it was fresh and the klinking of bolt-snaps on steel backplates and easy access to training from seasoned tek divers got a lot of people horny for the message. But they weren't the 90%. They were the 10% and even from that 10% some rejected it for various reasons some were content to be as they were and some just went tek. In other words for a lot of people DIR (in the form of DIR-F) looked like it filled the gap between REC and TEK and people went for it. It found a niche.
Will DIR advance? I hear GUE is busy with an OW course. This may turn out to be a mixed blessing in the end. You'll ge more people in the gear but you won't be able to avoid attracting the tourists. If GUE is going to compete with PADI on the OW field (ie bring DIR mainstream) then I have a feeling that the course will either need to be very expensive or very dumbed down. We could well end up eventually forgetting that DIR is more than just buying Halcyon......and making it flow smoothly from REC into TEK gives me a certain feeling in my gut that I don't like either.....
R..
Gentlemen, (and any of the ladies who might be listening in...)
One of the things we seem to be missing here is the concept of the "pyramid", or installed base.
We laugh about the PADI PYRAMID SCHEME. We laugh when we call PADI "Put Another Dollar In" diving. But we do NOT laugh, however, when we see the amount of money that flows into PADI in any one year! (Some who are in competition may even cry.) I submit to you that no organization that large, that successful, for so many years, can be doing everything wrong.
The key to this is the fact that PADI is, in fact, inclusive. To be more precise, they try hard to INCLUDE, not exclude.
Think for a moment, if you will, about the extremely successful skiing industry. People think nothing of spending several thousand dollars to get the equipment, and go on a trip to, say, Copper Mountain, where they get the basic training and do some skiing. It is seen as exciting, adventurous,...the "in" thing to do! They may do it again. They may not. Nevertheless, the point here is this, when they get to the bunny slope, they are INCLUDED. Whomever they may be, they are told they CAN do it, and they are helped along the way by some very able instructors on the bunny slope who WANT them to succeed. It obviously works, because skiing is a HUGE sport, with millions participating!
Now, I do not know what the percentage is for the drop-out rate in skiing, because I am not involved in that industry. What the industry does well, however, is create an extremely wide installed base, or population, if you will, of skiers. Consequently, there are lots MORE "skiers" no matter where you are in the pyramid. Thus, there are more skiing venues, more manufacturers developing equipment even up to their "technical" level, and more instructors working in all of the levels of the industry.
This is what the folks at PADI recognized was necessary, and what they do extremely well. I am not disregarding the contributions of other agencies. Here we speak of PADI, since it is by far and away the largest.
I submit to you all that, no matter what your position in the SCUBA PYRAMID, even if you are in that tiny percentage of folks who like it "deep, dark, and hard" as Michael Menduno likes to say, you would not have the equipment you have today, nor the support structure you have today, were it not for the folks at PADI! :book2:
One of the things we seem to be missing here is the concept of the "pyramid", or installed base.
We laugh about the PADI PYRAMID SCHEME. We laugh when we call PADI "Put Another Dollar In" diving. But we do NOT laugh, however, when we see the amount of money that flows into PADI in any one year! (Some who are in competition may even cry.) I submit to you that no organization that large, that successful, for so many years, can be doing everything wrong.
The key to this is the fact that PADI is, in fact, inclusive. To be more precise, they try hard to INCLUDE, not exclude.
Think for a moment, if you will, about the extremely successful skiing industry. People think nothing of spending several thousand dollars to get the equipment, and go on a trip to, say, Copper Mountain, where they get the basic training and do some skiing. It is seen as exciting, adventurous,...the "in" thing to do! They may do it again. They may not. Nevertheless, the point here is this, when they get to the bunny slope, they are INCLUDED. Whomever they may be, they are told they CAN do it, and they are helped along the way by some very able instructors on the bunny slope who WANT them to succeed. It obviously works, because skiing is a HUGE sport, with millions participating!
Now, I do not know what the percentage is for the drop-out rate in skiing, because I am not involved in that industry. What the industry does well, however, is create an extremely wide installed base, or population, if you will, of skiers. Consequently, there are lots MORE "skiers" no matter where you are in the pyramid. Thus, there are more skiing venues, more manufacturers developing equipment even up to their "technical" level, and more instructors working in all of the levels of the industry.
This is what the folks at PADI recognized was necessary, and what they do extremely well. I am not disregarding the contributions of other agencies. Here we speak of PADI, since it is by far and away the largest.
I submit to you all that, no matter what your position in the SCUBA PYRAMID, even if you are in that tiny percentage of folks who like it "deep, dark, and hard" as Michael Menduno likes to say, you would not have the equipment you have today, nor the support structure you have today, were it not for the folks at PADI! :book2:
Aquamaniac
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Spectre
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How many people remember the reason they took their OW class from who they took it from? I suspect I'm very similar to most people. I looked for PADI, I looked for a shop close to my house. I looked for one that was a PADI 5 star facility. I looked for one that had a decent price. I looked for one that had convenient hours.
Even if/when GUE starts an OW program, I don't expect it to take off like the others. It'll be a back-room, word of mouth thing that sits in it's own little niche and holds it's own. There is no way GUE will be able to compete with the likes of PADI, NAUI et. al. without sacrificing quality.
I'm not saying you can't get a quality OW education somewhere else, but as an OW student, you have no clue what you're looking for. All you know is "I want to dive", and you don't know the difference between quality instructors and idiot instructors. You learn all that later.
GUE will never be able to compete with the walk-in basic OW customer. It'll all be from people that heard about GUE from a diving friend.
Mine was the $99 price in 3' day-glo letters on the window. Totally clueless. My OW sucked, as I've outlined here many times before. If I didn't find the SSI shop when I did I'd probably be dead by now.
O-ring hit it too - GUE will continue to be the boutique course of choice for tweaks. And as such, will continue to be a target for the non-tweaks. And many GUE types will continue to look at the PADI army with an unfriendly eye. That's business. There are Nikon people, and there are Leica people.
They will find their niche, and it will be WOM that drives a good portion of their business. That, and repeat biz. They have a pyramid, too. Just as pointy, just as calculated, just as intentional. The base of their pyramid just isn't as large.
K
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