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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.
If the people making the purchase decisions aren't the software engineers, then why should the advertisements be tailored to them? of course I am speaking out of the side of my neck... in a more ideal environment, the purse-string-holder would consult the geeky-technician for an opinion before pulling the trigger on any tech purchases.
I don't know about you but I think he has egg on his face.. ASP.Net was a revolution..
.NET stuff. I'll probably never understand all the ASP. Cut-and-copy disease has made the thing a fucking pain to maintain. In contrast, the .NET stuff is readily understood.
.NET was a tremendous revolution but it did improve things considerably from a web development point of view.
For the first time rather than having three hundred asp/php pages with cut-and-copy disease we had a way to make structured code that could be developed very quickly and maintained easily.
At work we've got loads of legacy ASP and lots of new
I don't think
Simon.
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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In many areas, this is a big driver for convergance of different technologies - to be able to provide a "system" that does "something", not pieces that have to be put together. It's true that PCs have very tech centric marketing, but it is quite a bit better than it used to be - now you go out and buy a computer system with keyboard, mouse, printer, camera, monitor, etc etc. That used to not be the case, so I think there has been some level of improvement.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
The quality of software is appaling. The quality of OS is marginally better (or worse depending on what you use.)
The reason for this is very simple but to fix it requires people to open their eyes.
It starts with computers being deaf, dumb and blind, gets worse with how we think of information modeling (ask your DBA to model a wall. Its a simple and straight forward request. Bricks & mortar do NOT make a wall.) then we compound this with security that isn't in the least bit secure and it absolutely fall down from there.
Put on the THINK! sign people.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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."
Or something else... really...
To say that the current version of the Company X product is so much better than the previous version of the _same company's_ product does not really endorse _either_ version.
Paul B.
People aren't interested in "better" technology for its own sake. (And, "better" is usually a matter of debate. Just because techies think something is better, why should the rest of us agree? Or care?)
People buy "stuff" that that we can use to do whatever it is that we want to, preferably without breaking a sweat or needing to read a book first. Technical superiority, by itself, isn't much of a sales pitch. Why should I buy something that is "superior" if I know I won't use that "superiority"?
Techies like to say things like "Windows is unusable" (when most of the world uses it) or "corporations put profit above technology" (gee, do you think?). Just shows why a lot of them get along better with hardware than with people.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How long before people start subscribing to "computers"?
Why not have a reasonably fast system, all the software you need, broadband and tech support for "one low monthly fee". Whenever it gets obsolete someone appears and moves everything to a more recent system.
We "buy" cellphones that way, many people lease cars that way... sure it wont be popular here, but it'd work for most people.
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.
Every big announcement in the tech field for years now has been one limp-dicked anticlimax after another. Oooo! A new palm top PC running a ShitpileOS (Windows) variant that never quite does anything in particular very well. Oooo! Another all in one home entertainment system that's overpriced and has to be completely replaced if one part of it wears out. Piles of new tech gadgets constructed from lowest common denominator components. $8000 televisions. Cell phones with games worthy of, oh, the Sega Master System, at best. Seventeen more first person shooters that require $3000 worth of PC upgrades.
It's all just so boring and bland. IMHO, the only neat devices to come out in the past few years are the DVRs (Tivo/Replays/etc) because they really made a common task (watching TeeVee) vastly more efficient, and those tiny USB flash drives which have made shuttling a CD's worth of data quick and easy and tiny. Oh, and I like my iPod. Those are cool.
What I'd like to see is some existing technologies improved. Stop putting cameras and video games into cell phones, for example, and make the system work better. I should not be having dropped calls in a major metropolitan area at this point.
And, oh yean, my usual call for a functional sexbot. I'm telling ya, they will make their inventor $billions. If you happen to be working on one, hire me. I'm one of the best general digital and FPGA hardware designers you could hope for. I'm really bored in my current job. I want a piece of that sexbot action.
--- Ban humanity.
I read it like a movie trailer In a world where: When instead of selling distinct products ...
When even software developers don't have ...
This Fall, Miramax pictures presents "It's not about the technology"
Starring the 3 time Oscar winner ...
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.
.Net is a failed marketing campaign. That's it. It no longer makes sense to speak of ".Net" without some other qualifier. You can talk about:
.Net Framework. A platform.
Visual Basic.Net. A programming language.
Visual Studio Net. An IDE.
These were supposed to be part of a larger ".Net" product strategy, however the term ".Net" was so ill defined that the term became meaningless. So only use that term when referring to a specific product as above.
I have a simple rule: never touch a book whose title is a full sentence.
It's not obvious why it works so well. My working hypothesis is this: The writer had a message so important that even people who don't touch the book should get it. Where to put it? Cram it into the title. The problem is, if it fits in the title, it doesn't need a book, does it? Furthermore, anybody who's that sure his idea is so important is probably wrong about a lot else. Even if the book says more than the title, we have been given a good reason to distrust it before we open it.
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."
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Has anyone ever read eWeek? Each article is Microsoft marketing mumbo jumbo with high-level words and makes me wonder "wtf are they talking about?". I don't see any IT manager or company executive talk like that. Btw, eWeek is sponsered by Microsoft, just look at the ads every 2nd page.
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.
By adding a dubious, four year old dig at MS to the post, they manage to get the reviewer's actual comments ignored in favor of yet another M$ sux thread.
Good going guys!
When I was a kid, industry pulled the same crap on housewives by putting the same detergent in a packaging label "new and improved". Media outlets provide crap programming because that's what people will watch, which sells advertising. .Marketers have found equally fertile ground in technology.
If you want better products, quit buying the bullshit. Fewer dollars chasing the same products will weed out the bad. This is basic economics, people!
Many posters must be too young to remember Win16. Apparently on /. you have to name Windows 1,2,3.0,3.1, WinNT 3.x, Windows 95 etc. and remind them that Windows XP is NT 5.x!
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.
Tactics like this and others go back as far as I can remember. The only difference in the .com/2000 bubble was that a large group of business people believed it and spent billions on vaporware promises of profits with no fundamentally sound reason. I guess they don't teach MBAs how to calculate profits and do basic business marketing analysis first.
Grandma's in the mean time are looking at sub $500 solutions that does not require the maintenance of Microsoft Windows and with players like SAM's club are now selling alternatives. The real big kick will come from the Chinese as "toaster like" computers come in even cheaper and more reliable.
A very large part of this is due to businesses laying off the older experienced types and promoting those well past their level of experience and capability. We often think this is just a problem in I/T, but in actuality it is a problem in business in general as it is out with the baby boomer and in with the "never had to really work hard for a buck" generation.
This industry of computing is going to continue to evolve, it happened before with IBM and mainframes, now defunct Digital VAX, commodore PET, TRS-80, Apple, Apple II, Mac then PC. Next will be the standards based and open appliance.
No one quite knows the exact point when high-tech marketing went wrong.
I do. About two seconds after the words 'high-tech' and 'marketing' were merged in the acorn sized brain of a marketer. Due to their limited storage capacity any relevant technical information was squeezed out and replaced with marketing slogans. He/She/It thus completely divorced from reality was provided with the ability to create a marketing strategy unecumbered by facts.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It's the next generation fully intergrated high tech state of the art advanced enterprise object commerce cyber solution, revolutionizing cross section functionality and empowering eBusiness to streamline its communications architecture across multiple platform independent management systems, thus enabling a complete competetive cutting edge on demand information infrastructure.
Now, what don't you understand?
But people do pay attention. Advertising works. Advertising is what gets people to pay $500 for a pair of sneakers.
Yet if you ask a person who just paid that why he paid that, he won't ever say that it was because of the advertising. He will say it's about style or that they are the best sneakers or some other rationalisation. But the reality is that it is because of the marketing campaign.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Products that don't work
Service providers that can't make it work
Customers that don't care if it does
Executives that don't know IF it does
Solutions in search of problem that doesn't exist
Designed to fail, working as designed.
There are two kinds of people in the Computer Industry.
1. People who see computers as neat and useful tools, which can be adapted for nearly any purpose. Software or Products which give people additional ways to use their computers - especially tools that improve productivity, either personal, or at work, are generally going to succeed in the market place. The way to sell such products is often referred to as "Pull" Marketing.
2. People who see computers as neat and useful ways of getting consumers to spend money on stuff they wouldn't have otherwise spent it. This is accomplished by pushing crippleware that looks neat on the surface, but is essentially useless to a user until they pay more money to unlock the useful features, or basically, the software ends up being a complicated scam to get someone to sign up for some service with a monthly fee.
These products ultimately fail. This kind of marketing is referred to as "PUSH" Marketing.
At the end of the day, #1 is the correct way of looking at computers, and there are a couple of tennants of business and innovation that prove it:
"Built it, and they will come."
and
"Invent a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."
Unfortunately, High Tech Marketing is full of people who want the world to beat a path to their door, without all that costly and complicated mousetrap-inventing stuff.
They spend so much effort trying to find innovative ways to get people to spend more money, rather than innovated ways to make computers more useful tools for people to buy, because their lives are improved.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.