Author Archives: admin

Paranoia Pays

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Steve Jobs needs to call Andy Grove ASAP. Groves, one of Intel’s founders, was very clear on the concept of paranoia in the tech biz.  Perhaps being Hungarian and thus too well acquainted with Soviet oppression, Andy learned paranoia at a young age.  But he refined his paranoiac inclinations being in the technology business, a war zone where corporate death comes quickly and painfully.  Like a battlefield where every soldier is out for himself, nobody and no company are safe from competition. Not even Apple. Wildly popular and cult-like, the iPhone and iPad made indelible marks in the consumer electronics space.  Though pads and smartphones existed before Jobs took on the job, Apple refined the product category and advanced the expectations of the market.  Combined brilliance in product design and marketing led to worldwide buzz, techno lust and a stock price that makes members of the House of Saud blink … Continue reading →

Cheap Research

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Cheap marketing research is like a cheap date:  Sure, you have a transient and temporal moment of involvement, but nothing longer term ever comes from it and it can lead to nasty infections. This comparison recently came to mind when a client asked if there was any way we could scale back a proposal for performing market research.  As with most everything else, market research presents a tradeoff between cost and quality.  The results from seeking inexpensive alternatives are the same.  A discount paramour might deliver a life threatening disease and discount market research could deliver a fiscal death sentence. Either way you get … well, let’s not go there. Many miss three essentials about market research, namely qualitative breadth, quantitative depth, and statistical strength.  If any of these three elements are missing, your market research will lead you astray.  Hence, anyone attempting to understand their market needs to commit … Continue reading →

Reputation Rehabilitation

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It hurts to be disliked.  When a whole market thinks you stink on an ice floe, you have polar bear sized problems. A client recently engaged Silicon Strategies because the market didn’t think much of the client.  Though their software was considered ‘competent’, it was also thought of as based on the previous century’s technology and was not rapidly updated.  Our client had a well deserved and growing reputation of holding onto former glory and not keeping up with new millennia mentalities.  In short, the market had assigned them a negative brand. For them, exhibiting at events was like walking into a singles bar and watching every woman in the joint walk out. Our client faced this difficulty while preparing a new product which, at very least, brought them to par with competitors in important market segments.  From experience we knew that merely introducing the product was not enough — … Continue reading →

Segmentation Sanity

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Segmenting your market is like assembling a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle … where some of the pieces are missing, none fit together very well, and a few might even be from a different puzzle. I was reminded of this madness thanks to two separate clients. One is in the energy trading risk management (ETRM) software space and the other is in language services. Very different industries, very different customer verticals, hugely different buyer genotypes, and many of the exact same segmentation difficulties.  Their mutual difficulty was not in selecting relevant vectors on which to segment their markets, or divining the needs of any segment. The problem was the conflict between the theory of a segment and the reality. For example, one of these two clients had a subsegment that was largely untapped and, on paper, looked highly profitable. The reality was that most of this untapped segment contained companies that … Continue reading →

Up

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The concepts of “free” and “sex” sell more products than all other promotional elements, and if you are offering free sex people will line-up at your door. SaaS companies, among others, like “free” lead generation.  Most SaaS providers give away a limited version of their offering to collect people’s contact info and build long-term connections to the product.  Their grand scheme is always to up-sale freeloading bottom feeders into paid accounts.  Yet most SaaS companies have no plan of action for up-selling. It’s a SaaS underpants gnome problem. One of the problems is that online up-selling is a target moving faster than the one on Osama bin Laden’s back (we will get ya, boy).  Rules that made sense when Marc Benioff first started pimping Salesforce.com do not apply today.  There is no template, just a growing list of things to stop doing. The most prevalent mistake made in up-selling is … Continue reading →

Pulling Pathways

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“May I speak with Silicon?” Rarely am I stunned into silence.  Just ask my ex-wife or my congress critter.  Yet when I answered my phone in the middle of a rushed work day, and heard a clearly foreign voice on the other end asking for a person named Silicon, I was muted, torn between throwing a vitriolic fit of indignation or laughing aloud. I eventually opted for the former. After some ungentle queries on my part, it came to light that the cold caller was peddling web development services and was wondering if perhaps we might be in need of some.  Further interrogation (which at this point had become a source of amusement … for me, not the caller) showed that she knew nothing of my company, or business, our web site, or even the color of the sky given the distinct possibility that her call center was a dungeon … Continue reading →

Caffeine Headaches

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The easiest way to kill something nice is to make it popular. This certainly is the case with restaurants and bars.  Pleasant, cozy cafes and lounges become unlivable hellholes once they gain notoriety.  You can’t find a seat, a table, a waitress.  Service vanishes, quality suffers and you can’t enjoy the environment once 347,890 of your closest friends go there … every night.  The same may apply to software, though the mechanics of the destruction of value differs. Such may be the fate of Java. For all its early warts, Java became an important technology.  It was the first cross platform application language that didn’t suffer from 4GL rigidity or opaque stupidity of design.  Once woven into the fabric of web pages, it provided the first major addition to HTML and made web applications behave more like desktop applications.  The web became more intuitive while server-side applications became more fluid, … Continue reading →