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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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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/
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.
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.
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"
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 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.
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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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