On the other side of balance, I found this extremely exciting for many reasons and hadn't seen the release announcement anywhere until this morning. But then I guess that's the nice thing about the interweb. Opinion is varied, and we can use/. as an opinion platform to express to everyone interested in reading exactly how we feel. And it's all ok!
For what it's worth I like the look of it - smart consoles is an interesting industry at a very interesting stage in its development. I can't help but feel as an industry it's at the point where mobile phones got to just before they exploded and took over in areas and use-cases no-one in their right mind thought possible at the time.
Perhaps one day our TVs will just be really nice, high quality display-only devices, and the value will be in selling the access platform driven off devices like this... oh wait, I think we might be there already...
As you were!
In an attempt to actually answer the extremely good question as opposed to some of the perfectly good personal opinions:
As some of the comments have alluded to you are referring to Pre-sales Engineers who are this lovely breed of technically savvy, personable (mostly) and engaging characters who can articulate a technical message, marry it to a business requirement/message and do it convincingly.
I have been working in this capacity for 6+ years now and have been through many iterations of compensation, some of which were better than others. They were:
1. Per-sale based compensation - not so good as you're eating into the sales person's comp, and they don't like it. It also incentivises you to act more and more like a sales person. Not so good either.
2. Qualified pre-sales visits compensation - generally "how many pre-sales calls did you make". The goal is to measure the ability to generate new business. Not so good, as it's very difficult to quantify and track, and the general pattern of behaviour is to just have stacks of meetings without providing any quality.
3. Quarterly/Annual Revenue based - this has been the most successful in my experience. Success is measured on overall revenue generation of the sales organization (of which this kind of person is a part of) rather than individual sales based commission. Commission is generally a fixed amount per-quarter based on attaining revenue figures or % growth thereof over previous years/periods. This is good as it tends to remove the person a step or two back from chasing individual sales, and then bickering over the commission for each one. The fixed comission amount (say 15% of gross annually or something) coupled with the quarterly revenue targets creates a more team based focus for everyone to assist in the success of the venture.
As for the trusted advisor vs. sales debate - the sad truth is that no matter who you are, if you're asked to sell a single product/suite (instead of solutions) you're going to lose a little bit of your trusted advisor status as you're only pushing that single product rather than considering the larger picture/industry solutions.
I hope this helps, PM me if you'd like to discuss further as I have had exposure to a fair bit of this type of situation and may (or may not!) shed some light to help you come up with something that works for your company.
giving your iXXX the middle finger because you couldn't figure out the gesture you REALLY wanted. You may need to strap a Kinect to the device so it can interpret the touch-free nature of your gesture tho:)
With modern mice the whole laser accuracy thing shouldn't be too much of a revelation I guess. I recently shelled out for a Rat-7 on special which I am very happy with - not because I can shoot bad guys from the opposite side of the map with my sniper rifle because of 3 levels of laser accuracy - but because of the ergonomics of the thing. As someone said above, most peripherals are over-priced, and this one wasn't any exception - the difference is I was happy to fork out the extra $$ to get a comfortable peripheral that didn't leave my hand paralysed after 4 hours of COD.
Eish, too early indeed. I kick-started my day with this, and now I have to buy another coffee to reset. That's TWO coffees in 25 mins... I am beginning to suspect I have a vulnerability. No wait, it's a threat, but only if I someone spikes it, then the vulnerability lies with me, but the threat is external. OMG!
Awesome, yet another device that unsuspecting consumers can get infected with viruses and make our botnet problem even worse. How long before you can buy your favorite flavor of AV product for your telly?
Slashdot Mirror
On the other side of balance, I found this extremely exciting for many reasons and hadn't seen the release announcement anywhere until this morning. But then I guess that's the nice thing about the interweb. Opinion is varied, and we can use /. as an opinion platform to express to everyone interested in reading exactly how we feel. And it's all ok!
For what it's worth I like the look of it - smart consoles is an interesting industry at a very interesting stage in its development. I can't help but feel as an industry it's at the point where mobile phones got to just before they exploded and took over in areas and use-cases no-one in their right mind thought possible at the time.
Perhaps one day our TVs will just be really nice, high quality display-only devices, and the value will be in selling the access platform driven off devices like this... oh wait, I think we might be there already...
As you were!
hmm, I do believe you are correct. -1 grammar for me.
"To be fair, drooping porn", "adult to go down" whomever wrote that press-release should be given a medal.
for some reason all my formatting died in the posting - that should read a lot easier :(
In an attempt to actually answer the extremely good question as opposed to some of the perfectly good personal opinions: As some of the comments have alluded to you are referring to Pre-sales Engineers who are this lovely breed of technically savvy, personable (mostly) and engaging characters who can articulate a technical message, marry it to a business requirement/message and do it convincingly. I have been working in this capacity for 6+ years now and have been through many iterations of compensation, some of which were better than others. They were: 1. Per-sale based compensation - not so good as you're eating into the sales person's comp, and they don't like it. It also incentivises you to act more and more like a sales person. Not so good either. 2. Qualified pre-sales visits compensation - generally "how many pre-sales calls did you make". The goal is to measure the ability to generate new business. Not so good, as it's very difficult to quantify and track, and the general pattern of behaviour is to just have stacks of meetings without providing any quality. 3. Quarterly/Annual Revenue based - this has been the most successful in my experience. Success is measured on overall revenue generation of the sales organization (of which this kind of person is a part of) rather than individual sales based commission. Commission is generally a fixed amount per-quarter based on attaining revenue figures or % growth thereof over previous years/periods. This is good as it tends to remove the person a step or two back from chasing individual sales, and then bickering over the commission for each one. The fixed comission amount (say 15% of gross annually or something) coupled with the quarterly revenue targets creates a more team based focus for everyone to assist in the success of the venture. As for the trusted advisor vs. sales debate - the sad truth is that no matter who you are, if you're asked to sell a single product/suite (instead of solutions) you're going to lose a little bit of your trusted advisor status as you're only pushing that single product rather than considering the larger picture/industry solutions. I hope this helps, PM me if you'd like to discuss further as I have had exposure to a fair bit of this type of situation and may (or may not!) shed some light to help you come up with something that works for your company.
giving your iXXX the middle finger because you couldn't figure out the gesture you REALLY wanted. You may need to strap a Kinect to the device so it can interpret the touch-free nature of your gesture tho :)
With modern mice the whole laser accuracy thing shouldn't be too much of a revelation I guess. I recently shelled out for a Rat-7 on special which I am very happy with - not because I can shoot bad guys from the opposite side of the map with my sniper rifle because of 3 levels of laser accuracy - but because of the ergonomics of the thing. As someone said above, most peripherals are over-priced, and this one wasn't any exception - the difference is I was happy to fork out the extra $$ to get a comfortable peripheral that didn't leave my hand paralysed after 4 hours of COD.
Eish, too early indeed. I kick-started my day with this, and now I have to buy another coffee to reset. That's TWO coffees in 25 mins... I am beginning to suspect I have a vulnerability. No wait, it's a threat, but only if I someone spikes it, then the vulnerability lies with me, but the threat is external. OMG!
"Outputted" - seriously? More coffee for the poster methinks. Or a spell check enabled browser.
Awesome, yet another device that unsuspecting consumers can get infected with viruses and make our botnet problem even worse. How long before you can buy your favorite flavor of AV product for your telly?
and there I thought this was going to be about releasing proxy servers into the wild ...
and yet again, it appears the only group to benefit are the f!cking lawyers. How surprising...