Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Service Marketing

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“Sometimes you have to get their attention first,” said the old farmer, who had just whacked his mule in the forehead with a two-by-four. The mule, a little stunned, nonetheless quit being ornery and started pulling the plow. Perhaps Dell has some mule blood in it. Dell is discovering what green marketeers discover in about their forth year of their careers — namely that service is a product. Like all products, quality and suitability to the needs of the customers determines success. Given that technology is complex and that no technology user can last long without support, it becomes a critical differentiator for long-term financial success. (A snide aside: If you want a glaringly good example of lousy customer service, just talk to anyone that uses web hosting from 1and1.com, a company that routinely explores the depths of customer disregard. The horror stories about 1and1.com technical support would make Steven … Continue reading →

Micro-hoo?

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In the all business, and especially in technology, there are three ways to grow: you can innovate product, you can change the rules of the game (marketing), or you can buy your way up (cash). When I see a hyper-competitive company like Microsoft making a multi-billion dollar plays to buy their way up a market, then I know they failed to innovate or market. And that is the condition in which we find Balmer and Company with their mega bid for Yahoo. We’ll call the merged company-to-be Micro-hoo? Microsoft — despite making the Internet a consumer product by bolting a TCP/IP stack into Windows long ago — was slow to see that former Sun CEO Scott McNealy was right when he said “The network is the computer.” The Internet is the only infrastructure bigger than what Microsoft had already created. As such it is a glorious place to make some … Continue reading →

Commoditized Consolidation

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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 →

Netscape Necrology

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Alas, poor Netscape. I knew them heretofore. It is indeed sad to see the reaper claim Netscape Navigator. And sadly enough, the very thing that brought them fame may well have killed them — namely buzz. When the net was first being popularized, and HTML was still a quirky technology at best, we had limited choices for web surfing. People with graphical terminals (you lucky *#&**#^!) had Mosaic. Primitive as it was, it at least allowed for direct and intuitive access to the few thousand web pages in existence at that time. It was a durn site better than the text-based browsers (lynx) to which I was restricted. Then along came Netscape. They picked-up where Mosaic left-off, adding polish and professionalism. Andreessen, Clark and the rest of the Netscape team knew the net better than most anyone at the time, and leveraged that knowledge in one of the earliest instances … Continue reading →

Wireless Wedge

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Closed systems make money. Open systems make money. And the two dynamics are co-exists … for a while. I’m pondering these realities as I comb through reports in the wireless market, where Silicon Strategies has a new client. The evolution of the wireless market will soon make a shift and the smarter vendors are rapidly adapting to the inevitable. First, a musing on closed and open markets. In closed markets, the vendor has control by virtue of either a monopoly or through customer lock-in due to the high cost customers face in switching to different technologies. The IT technology industry was a closed market for a seeming eternity until the folks at Berkeley began porting and promoting their flavor of UNIX (which could be considered the original computer virus). When Sun Micro and other vendors began using open standards (like UNIX) as a wedge into the market, the closed system … Continue reading →

Downturn

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The stock market has correctly predicted 12 of the last seven recessions. Should we have more faith in Goldman Sachs, Gartner, IDC, Regent, MGI Research, the Financial Times and others in forecasting financial apocalypse? No, we shouldn’t. But fail to put the two together and you’d be dumber than my cousin Earl, a man with an IQ so low he can only find employment as a congressman. Businesses and consumers alike change their spending priorities when times are good and when they are not. The world economy is still absorbing the effects of high oil prices (driven as best as I can tell by pure speculative fervor). These inflationary pressures are just beginning to leak their way into the free economy maelstrom as the market bottoms out from a sub-prime induced credit crunch. The net effect is that everyone is beginning to rein-in their spending, with the glaring exception being … Continue reading →