Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Virtual Position

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When I read rumors that Oracle is buying one of our former clients I wonder what we did right. Long ago and in the earliest phase of their interesting existence, we consulted to Virtual Iron. We helped with event management, presentations and removing kinks from their messaging when Virtual Iron was vending a lost cause. In those long ago days, Virtual Iron was selling sophisticated virtualization systems that not only let you divide one big server into many smaller servers (what most buyers perceive as virtualization) but they could glue several servers together via Infiniband switches and thus make many small servers look like one huge box. They were a few tiny steps away from private cloud computing, though they did not know it nor was there an industry buzz word to propel their value proposition. Virtual Iron was in what I call the ‘bottleneck bypass business’, which is always … Continue reading →

Slippery Slump

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Financial forecasters foretell that the technology sector leads the economy out of recessions. Which means we are in for a long one this time. I decline to scare my fellow technophiles into believing the end is nigh. It might be … I just lack any specific evidence indicating eminent doom. North Korea and Iran are persistent wild cards but they have nothing to do with technology marketing. They are strictly consumers of high tech products like rockets and reactors. Yet as recessions go, this one will be worse than average. Today the Federal Reserve – co-progenitor of the current recession, thank you Mister Greenspan – downgraded their economic forecast. Far from being Depression 2.0, the outlook is still glum with unemployment rates and GDP shrinkage rivaling the late 1970s. The Fed’s dower description of the economy echoes what Computer Economics predicts – that the recession will not bottom out until … Continue reading →

Google Grab

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Advertising is only part of Google’s gain with mobile phones. Much has been made about Google’s mobile advertising potential in deploying Android, their free Linux-based mobile operating system. Google will indeed make a(nother) boatload money through advertisements on cell phones. But this is only part of the Google strategy. The other components should worry competitors more. Let’s stipulate a few things in order for the market dynamics to be clear: Mobile devices are the prophesized unified communications portal (servers be damned). Due to constant availability, mobile devices will become the first option for most people for discovery and use of information. Unifying the end user experience while roaming and at the desk creates commitment by the customer/user. Therein lay the competitive threat from the G-Phone. For years now Google has created end user services (search, maps, photo galleries, office apps, more). The services are generally cost free for the users. … Continue reading →

Breaking Security

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Sometimes the only way to win a market is to break it. Markets tend to stagnate. Solutions become entrenched due to offerings being well understood and being good enough. To enter such markets with the same class of product is an elegant and expensive form of corporate suicide. When faced with such situations you need to invent products and services that not only add value but shatter the current market precepts. Think of Genghis Khan as a new and different product and the Xia Dynasty as the established market. Call it creative destruction or disruptive technology. The marketing principle at play is that offering the same product as everyone else means you offer nothing at all and that you will eventually compete on price. That is the definition of a commodity and that is a lousy way to make a living. A case in point of shattering a stagnant market … Continue reading →

Sinking Satyam

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I recently gave a talk at the Software Licensing and Marketing (SLAM) conference where I painted a dower and gloomy picture for technology marketing this and next year. Seems I may have been overly optimistic. Though not yet officially proclaimed, we are in a recession. If my wet cocktail napkin math is any good, we will in this recession for quite some time — well into next year. Oddly though, in the earliest quarters of this recession some multi-national tech companies (Oracle, IBM, etc.) reported amazingly good sales growth. And this will be a short lived phenomenon as the recession spreads. Dig into their numbers. For example, IBM recently reported an 11% sales growth. But if you subtract the effects of the falling U.S. dollar, IBM’s sales grew a mere 4%. Granted, any real growth in the early part of a recession is a Good Thingâ„¢. But for an industry … Continue reading →

Oracle Roars

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You have to give Larry Ellison credit. When he makes up his mind to do something, he’ll take on the biggest and the baddest in order to win. He faced down the Federal government when he acquired most of the competitors in the ERP market in one massive gulp. And he swallowed them with very little apparent corporate indigestion. Now Larry has set his sight on the king of SaaS and arguably of CRM, pointing both barrels on SalesForce.com. Given my first encounter with SalesForce tech support this morning, I find myself on the verge of urging Ellison on. Aside from being a hosted offering based upon the bones of Seibel CRM, there is little newsworthy about the product itself except for the integration of some social media flavored features. For example, any object in the data (a contact’s name for example) can have a “sticky note” slapped on it, … Continue reading →

Marcom Meticulosity

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I feel a lecture coming on! I’m a bit anal retentive when it comes to marketing communications. This trait is constantly reinforced when I work with technology companies. As a species, they are the worst marcom machines on the face of Gawd’s gray world. So today I deviate from discussions of markets and strategy to communicate about communications. Specifically I’m going to give away some expertise about how to compose marketing prose. Rule #1 – don’t alliterate: It is really annoying. Rule #2 – know your audience: It is one thing to understand your audience, but another thing entirely to know them. “Knowing” means you are in their shoes, doing their job, and feeling their pain. It involves a deep connection that reveals their true motivations. For example, an IT executive might say he wants to reduce application development costs, but his true motivation is to spend that money on … Continue reading →