Marketing Mistakes

Commoditized Consolidation

Posted on 2008/01/16 by admin2008/01/16

I have written often about how the technology industry is commoditizing itself. I have also written about how consolidation is an inevitable process in every industry. Now we see how the two work together and create what some might view as the End of Days (of course those same people had apocalyptic visions when Microsoft announced NT). The big news of the day, week, month, and thus far the entire year is that Sun Micro (of all people) is buying MySQL for a cool billion dollars. So much for Mister Mickos growing rich slowly. This takes the world’s most popular DBMS (in terms of number of installations) and gives it a global sales and support team. Not bad for a hardware company. (The wisdom of forfeitting 8% of Sun’s current market capitalization is suspect however — you can buy a lot of offshore programmer time for a bill) MySQL, like … Continue reading →

Errant GPS Ad

Posted on 2007/12/17 by admin2007/12/17

Upon occasion marketing professionals are under such onerous deadlines that even they make mistakes. Here’s a good one. The photo to the right was scanned from a Sunday newspaper circular by Office Depot. Like a lot of folks, OD is peddling GPS units, this year’s hot gift. They had a pretty good price on this model that was advertised in a San Francisco newspaper. It might have been so cheap because it evidently has road maps of Europe and not America (despite the ad claiming maps of the U.S. and Canada). But unit above is clearly giving directions in a Germanic language (“Ungarn- auf Louise-Schroder-Platz” translates to “Hungary at Louise Schroder place” according to Bablefish). The turn distances are in meters, not yards, and the arrival time of day is labeled “Ankunft.” Now, you and I know some harried intern or first-year graphics employee likely grabbed an image from the … Continue reading →