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It's Not About The Technology
20 chapters are written from the point of view of tech marketing executive, as Karamchedu tries to answer the question of why some products gain a loyal audience and enjoy commercial success, while the others are simply additions to the dusty shelves of history. Everyone has their favorite comparison, where a technically advanced product does not gain acceptance on the market while a supposedly inferior competitor is rolling in cash. Hey, IBM built an entire theory on how it was safe to let Microsoft sell its not-so-great DOS with IBM PCs in order to push the hardware from the warehouse while the company was preparing the next revision of state-of-the-art OS/2 -- which, of course, everyone will buy on the day of release in order to replace Microsoft's software.
History occasionally teaches tech marketers some curious lessons, and the conclusion that the author comes up is summarized in the book title. The title might sound like an insult to a design engineer, but in most of the cases the success in the market is not guaranteed by superiority of technology. Karamchedu is on the mission to find out why.
The first chapters take us through a conflict inside a company. Seldom will you find a high-tech startup where marketing people do not clash with engineers. Marketers promise the features to the customers in order to adhere to the mantra of "we listen to our customers," only to see feature requests denied by the engineers, since the budgets and deadlines are fixed. Marketers then complain to the executives about lack of response from the engineering staff and their inability to deal with the new features, while engineers fight back, claiming that the product is about to miss the deadline even with existing feature set and overworked staff.
Later, Karamchedu focuses on a second problem, peculiar to high-tech marketers: after being immersed in the technology world for too long, they cannot relate to the customers. Hence grandmas in Best Buy staring at the computer described as "P4 3.0 GHz 256 DDR 40.0 GB DVD/CD-RW" when all she wants to know is whether she can check email and view photos of the grandkids. Marketers forget to empathize with the customers. They spend too much time with engineering, and like to tell customers how the new microprocessor has a much wider front-side bus, or how their new piece of software supports dual-core systems, without really telling the customer how that will improve business processes or increase efficiency.
The third part of the book takes a look at a typical semiconductor company and tries to draw the plan of attack for a starting marketing executive. At this point the book turns into a manual on high-tech marketing, which the author hopes the readers will find useful, as there are no set rules and algorithms for launching successful marketing campaigns in high-tech world.
The book is quite insightful, but one can't help but feel that it is missing something. It will probably prove to be a valuable read to anyone facing the daunting task of marketing a high-tech product, but even though I got to the last page of the book, I found the title to be too terse and dry, lacking concrete examples and not quite coherent as far as the chapter-by-chapter arrangement. The preface and the author's description of the book are available online. It's also strange that in an attempt to write a textbook on high-tech marketing, the author decided to provide no case studies whatsoever. In Search of Stupidity from Apress is a great book about high-tech marketing, since it tells the story of a failed marketing attempt and also tries to figure out the reasons, but in It's Not About the Technology, Karamchedu just tells years of his personal experience, without references to specific companies or projects, which makes the book a compilation of abstractions on high-tech marketing.
In his spare time Alex enjoys reading technology and business titles. He also keeps a collection of free books for readers on a budget." Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
When looking at a brochure-style website dealing with services or products, count how many times the word "solution" is used. The higher the number, the more full of crap they are. The all-time record is held by ibm.com.
It went wrong when the biggest players in the market can sell lemon to the consumers and get away with it. Think of how many versions of M$ windows are unusable before a service pack 2 or 3.
Imagine buying a car and it doesn't work until 6 months later when your manufacturer has a recall for you. Commercial hi-tech industry seriously need a good role model.
It took me 3 years to have a basic understanding of what .NET was. 3 years just to figure out that it was basically Java.
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I remember when advertising would list the benefits of a product. Now all it has is a picture of the sky with a question "where do you want to go today?". Thanks a lot, that tells me nothing.
I was reading some back issues of Pc Magazine from the 80's, the ads told me as much as the articles. Ads would say "The new microsoft compiler has these features... that are better than the last version" I miss those type of ads.
The problem is that consumers believe marketers' lies, which are cheaper to produce than a working product. High-tech is no different from any other industry (what do you know of that really works, the way high-tech "doesn't"?), except the cost difference between marketing lies and good products is extremely high, matched only by the their obvious difference in performance. While that NP-complete problem is intractable, the breakdown occurs when consumers react to discovery of the lies, when the product sucks, by switching liars. High-tech offers greater possibility for changing that, as the degree to which products actually work is increasing consumers' ability to filter the lies, and report the reality, through mass P2P communications by people with mutual interest in consuming quality, rather than producing profit.
--
make install -not war
When I give lectures about highly technical topics like J2EE, half of my presentation is writing buzzwords to the whiteboard and explaining what it actually means. Most of the time I finish with: "See, this is really trivial. It was made to LOOK complicated, because the business needs it. But you are technical experts, you should know how simple it is."
I don't know about you but I think he has egg on his face.. ASP.Net was a revolution..
.NET. You're talking about one aspect and more easily defined part of .NET, called ASP.NET.
.NET actually was supposed to be. People would ask me what it was, being a developer they thought I knew, and I could usually muster was, "Well, it's a lot of things all under one umbrella."
.NET APIs. But back when Joe's article came out, .NET was being bandied about to talk about everything, from Windows .NET Server (aka Windows 2003 Server), to the new API/platform to replace COM, to a set of web services (like Passport), etc.
That is highly debatable, but Joel was talking about
Back in 2000, it *WAS* confusing as to what the fuck
Now when people say ".NET" they are usually talking about ASP.NET or the
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
ASP.NET doesn't introduce anything new, unless you've only used ASP and have since upgraded to (pre-existing) functionality that "new" in ASP.NET.
.NET. Each control on a page manages it's state via the view state.
.NET.
Not true at all. Each "page" is a class and is treated as such in it's implementation from a functional perspective.
A UI developer can make changes to the controls, with out wortying about breaking some server script. In addition it is possible to completely remove SQL code from the presentation tier, this is not possible with out a great deal of engineering and com components with traditional ASP.
ASP.NET simplifies state management on three levels, application, session, and page as well. Page state is something that has traditionally needed to be built by the developer, but this is no longer the case in
Also validation for all forms is simple and easy to implement, taking a fraction of the time to complete, and it's twice as robust (it runs client side, and server side depending on what your browser will support)
At the moment, I'd be hard pressed to find another technology platform for web development that is as flexible as
The revolution was really for the developer - not so much from a product perspective. Have a look at how easy it is to incorporate 3rd party components into web applications. Provided the 3rd party provided designed their component well, it usually "just works". That's more than I can say for similar development platforms.
I never touch ASP, but if your PHP suffers from "cut-and-copy" you need to take a cattle prod to the developers.
This is a coding practices issue, not a language issue - the legacy code at my current employer is C++ CGI programs that suffer greatly from the use of cut-and-paste rather than code libraries. It's just about the worst C++ code I've ever seen, but that's not C++'s fault. PHP makes it easy to create reusable modules that you can just "require_once"; if developer's don't, that's not PHP's fault.
"Our old code in Language X sucks, our new code in Language Y is better written" doesn't mean that X is better than Y.
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I hear that at work all day and it drives me nuts. Not that I don't look at specs when I buy a computer, but I have learned never to ask about anyone else's new computer because you get the five minute laundry list of numbers that have no real importance. Do I really need to know if your new Duh-ell PC has an 80G or 100G hard drive? PC specs have replaced dick size and engine displacement as bragging fodder or something.
I overheard the guy in the office next to me last year spend hours on the phone shaving costs of his new PC. $10 here. $5 there. He must have spent 20 hours to save $100. He drives a $45,000 car. Nobody places value on their time. He finally bought the thing and announced it to the bay the next day. Absentmindedly, I asked what kind... D'oh! Nine hours later I could have reverse engineered a schematic of the motherboard based on what this guy told us.
--- Ban humanity.
Frankly, its disgusting at times because they hurt the credibility of the entire industry (not that we had much with the /. crowd to begin with).
I try to do my part by not misleading people with what I market as I understand that an informed customer that you treat with respect will be a repeat customer who will spread the good word about you. I also inform people of when deceptive marketing/advertising is used and explain why it is bad and meaningless.
I think all of you are familiar with such lies as the "industry leader" claim or the "does more" claim. To those I have to ask "industry leader according to whom? The CEO fo the company? Because legally as long as you have the quote from someone, you are allowed to make that claim", and then I ask "does more? Does more WHAT?! Oh wait, legally that doesn't matter as long as you don't state it. It could ben "does more to line the CEOs wallets" and it would still be legal."
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He doesn't know how to work them or even why a cell phone that works in Europe won't always work in the US
They have their point of view based upon their requirements / values and have trouble recognizing that other people have different requirements / values which result in different points of view.But part of "Marketing" is making the consumer believe they have a "need" that they weren't aware of before, that can only be supplied by your product.
That "need" can be as esoteric as "I am a rebel against authority" to as mundane as "fast food you like".
Marketing high tech is different from most other markets because newer stuff is constantly being released. The perception of obsolescence is a key factor both in pushing the new stuff (don't be a loser, everyone else is faster) and in resistance to purchasing (why buy now when tomorrow it will be faster and cheaper).
I haven't read the book so I don't know if he covers that in depth.
But a solution is often a set or range of products, and in the case of vendors like IBM those products are paired with service. When you sell a product, the assumption is that once you sell it, you want nothing to do with the customer from thereon after. Tech support is offered only for problems. But if you are trying to impress upon customers the notion that the product and the sometimes rather involved, in-depth service associated with it are equally important, the term "solution" makes sense.
While the term is applicable to IBM, it's not applicable to many products that simply bill themselves as a solution, when in fact the vendor would rather eat rat poison than provide integrated and thorough support.
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