Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Threat and Alliance

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When Silicon Strategies Marketing was busy making SuSE famous, we formed a number of interesting alliances. At the peak of our marketing frenzy we charged IBM, AMD, VMWare and others cash to participate in the SuSE event booth – to co-brand an co-present as shown in this picture from LinuxWorld 2003 (partner co-branding flying over our booth and us holding an audience after the show closed and while exhibit hall crews rolled-up the carpets). Part of the strategy we put in play for SuSE was to communicate one step ahead of Red Hat. While the fedora-toped gang was still droning on about Linux being cheaper, we recruited major infrastructure vendors (hard and soft) to help us talk about integration and strategy planning. Since the market had decided to go with Linux, these talking points were what customers were thinking about – instant alignment. We went out of our way to … Continue reading →

Locked-in

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Lock-in as a marketing strategy is alive, well, and unfortunately growing. For dot-communists and those raised in the era of Linux, vendor lock-in is the art of keeping customers captive. By making people commit to a technology, and thus raising the pain of switching away from said technology, vendors cause customers to linger even when they do not want to. I know CIOs who for decades have blustered against Cognos and being locked into stiff annual license fees for PowerHouse, Cognos’ ancient 4GL. Yet they pay the fee every year knowing that rewriting thousands of lines of PowerHouse code is pretty pricy too. Another variation of vendor lock-in is commonly called upgrade robbery. I encountered such a scam this week when I noticed my ancient (circa 2003) smartphone buttons started to stick. In order to upgrade to a newer smartphone, AT&T insists that I buy $720 worth of wireless data … Continue reading →

Adobeture

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I was unsurprised by Adobe’s Omniture acquisition. Until I saw the price they paid. Adobe is sitting on stacks of cash. As is routine with tech companies, cash fat firms buy other outfits during recessions when acquisition prices are normally lower. Omniture was not suffering, so Adobe’s $1.8B buy may be the right price to pay for this strategic move. I asked my acquaintances in both Adobe and Omniture about this … and they wisely said nothing, forwarding me links to official press releases. I obviously need sneakier friends. The stock market didn’t think it was a good short-term move. Despite beating the street’s estimates on quarterly earnings, Adobe shares dropped more than 6% on the announcement. Perhaps short-term selling of Adobe stock is warranted because their software sales revenues continue to suffer during the recession. But in the long term Omniture’s less volatile SaaS revenue streams will compliment and … Continue reading →

Miserably Misaligned

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Legendary are the disturbances between marketing and sales. Within the narrow geography of Silicon Valley, such interoffice disputes between the two camps have crippled businesses, caused collateral causalities and brought down small third-world governments. And for no good reason. I recently saw such a conflict up-close. With all my years in the game, this occurrence was nothing new and I could see the waters boiling long before other people did. The actors and stage setting were different, but the plot was the same as always. Groundhog Day with different dialogue. To understand sales/marketing skirmishes, one has to understand the attitudes, perspectives and psychoses of either camp. Nobody is without sin, but there ain’t no saints either. Perspective of importance Though not unique, the sales director in the latest episode proclaimed in a mass inter-company email “Marketing exists to support sales.” Ignoring the utter arrogance of the individual, we can say … Continue reading →

Solid Move

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It is always fun to see a market tipping point at the moment it occurs. Samsung, the Korean tech titan, is rumored to be exiting the hard drive business for ultra thin notebooks, switching instead to solid state drive (SDD) production. It appears that Hitachi, Fujitsu, Seagate and Western Digital have abandoned that market as well, leaving Toshiba alone to peddle electricity sucking spindles for your groin warmer. When five out of six primary players leave a market, you know that market is toast. Intel is accelerating the switch. They report that as soon as next month they will double the density of their SSDs, pumping in a hefty 160GB into the small form factor. Since SSDs are a relatively new market phenomenon, and since work has only begun on how to bundle more bits into the drives, we can expect Moore’s law to switch from CPU cycles to SSD … Continue reading →

Segmenting Inside

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Once in a great while you see a company doing what would be sane in other markets, but might be a Herculean improbability in their own. Yes, this has to do with the Linux market. Specifically this has to do with the embedded Linux market, a realm so fragmented that ‘chaos’ is too polite a description. It is also one of Linux’s silent success stories. Odds are that you are within five feet of one or more devices that have embedded Linux inside. Glancing about my office I count three (a printer, a router, and a cell phone, though I suspect the hub and print server at Linux-based as well). The embedded Linux market is fragmented along several vectors. The primary vector of discord is the application. Router makers and printer makers and cell phone makers have different interest and needs with embedded Linux. A while back my neighbors at … Continue reading →

Open Assaults

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IBM knows how to club competitors. Using Open Source for the betterment of your products is well understood. Using Open Source to grind your competitors face into the dirt is more of an art. Yet when done well it accomplishes the primary objective of competitive marketing – attacking your opponent’s strengths. For technology marketing tyros reading this, understand that attacking your competitors weaknesses is a losing game. Weaknesses are typically marginal worries to consumers. If your competitor’s weakness were serious then they would have never become a competitor. Even if the weaknesses were important, they can be corrected and thus your assaults will be short lived. Attacking their strengths however is to eat their souls. Your competitor’s strengths are what made them successful. Any time you can assault their strengths you attack the very foundation of their prosperity. Successfully making their strength into a weakness will do more harm than … Continue reading →