Marketing Opinions
Articles:
Silicon Valley 4.0 Conference
Branding Gone Wrong: Industry Standards
Evolving Product Planning Technology
Silicon Valley 4.0 Conference
The future of the future in Silicon Valley
Two weeks ago I attended the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference put on by Garage.com.
The idea behind the conference was to discuss "the future of the
future".
Silicon Valley 1.0 was the Semiconductor revolution. 2.0 was the Personal Computer era. 3.0 was the Internet era. So what will be 4.0?
The panels were good - top tier VCs, a conversation with Mike Moritz and Eric Schmidt about Google, demos of interesting new products (including Jeff Hawkins demoing the Treo 600), and as a special guest the demographer for the United Nations, who gave us fascinating statistics about growth rates, India, China, immigration and several other things.
But I have to say, there was no real hint at what Silicon Valley 4.0 will be. Biotech, wireless, nanotech - these were all discussed. But no one said anything with any kind of certainty or knowing.
The big lesson in my opinion came from the first panel - Les Vadasz of Intel representing 1.0 Semiconductors, John Sculley representing 2.0 PCs and Judy Estrin representing 3.0 Internet.
The take away? "No one really knows it until it is happening full force. Even with waves 1, 2 and 3 we could tell we were onto something but we had no idea how big it was actually going to be".
What's the moral of the story? If you see what you think is a wave, bet big and bet fast if you are going to bet at all...
Branding Gone Wrong: Industry Standards
The wonderful thing about industry standards is that they give companies an easy way to add value to their products and they give the consumer a stamp of approval that all is well and that products will work together. A few examples include Wi Fi, USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. The downside of industry standards is that they quickly become checklist items on a feature list - everyone includes them and this allows for no differentiation.
A few companies try to get around this by attempting to brand industry standard features. I recently had two experiences with new products that pointed out why doing this can work horribly against a company. Both were with major brands, Apple and Sony, and both are a good example of how a company can become disillusioned into thinking that their power and influence in the industry is beyond what will matter to their customers.
The first experience was with Apple. I recently built a digital recording studio using Pro Tools from Digidesign and a dual processor G4 Macintosh. Years ago I was the Product Manager for the Finder and Human Interface at Apple, and in the digital recording world it is well-known that Macs are the best platform for working with audio (less hassles, better software, etc.), so I thought that going with a Mac was the right thing to do.
I'm not a Mac guy anymore - I switched to Windows back in the mid 90's, so I had to do a lot of footwork up front to determine which model to buy and what features I wanted. Part of my requirements were that I needed to be able to use the machine with my home Wi Fi (802.11b) network.
Now Apple a few years ago decided to brand Wi Fi and call it Airport. This would provide wonderful differentiation for them, and the loyal Apple masses certainly liked it. (At least four or five times I had Apple fans tell me that Airport was easy and great).
But here's the problem. For the rest of the world outside of Apple's customer base branding Airport creates uncertainty, doubt and an obstacle in the buying process.
I wanted to make sure that Airport was compatible with my industry standard Wi Fi router, so I started asking people about it. I asked all of the Apple fans I knew, and none of them had any idea what Wi Fi was. I asked the techies I knew, and they said "there is a good chance it will work, but I'm not sure." I went to the Apple website and searched for 802.11b and Wi Fi and found nothing. Then I went into an Apple store and asked a salesperson - he had never heard of Wi Fi and had no idea what I was talking about.
In this case Airport worked against Apple in a big way.
The second example has to do with Sony. My wife and I bought a new digital camcorder from Sony. It has been a great product and far exceeded our expectations. So much so that I decided to try doing some digital video editing. After all, I had just bought the G4 Mac for my music studio and it is supposed to be THE premier machine for editing video.
I tried to determine if the video camera (which is a fairly new model) would work with the Mac. No mention of it anywhere. I had read the Sony manual and it talked about connecting to a computer, either using USB or in some cases using a computer that supported Sony's ilink fast transfer technology. I tried USB. No luck. I knew the Mac had industry standard Firewire built in, but there was no mention of firewire anywhere in the Sony documentation or Sony's website. I finally gave up.
As it turns out, I mentioned this to a tech-savvy friend of mine. He had gone through the same thing. He enlightened me that ilink is FireWire (had I known to look for the mentions of IEEE 1394 standard compatibility all would have been fine). I hooked up the camera and got it to work within minutes.
I'll take the blame for not knowing Firewire was also referred to as IEEE1394. But if I don't' know that, and I work in the tech industry, imagine how confused the rest of the world out there is about whether Sony's ilink products are compatible.
How much money, time and effort did Apple spend branding Airport and Sony spend branding ilink? I don't know. I'm sure it seemed like a smart idea to their marketing people at the time.
Was this Marketing Brilliance, or not?
Evolving Product Planning Technology
Automating the Enterprise
The last twenty years have seen a steady flux of technology aimed at orchestrating and automating practically every business process found in the enterprise. From manufacturing planning to supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise solutions have helped both to introduce and support best practices for these core enterprise processes.
In the least two years, product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions have gained momentum addressing the need to manage the "product record" (in the same way that CRM systems manage the "customer record"). However, attention to date has centered on product execution and managing product assets through the product lifecycle. Only recently have solutions emerged for the pre-requisite and equally critical product planning process.
Common Tools for Product Planning
Readers who manage their product roadmaps in MS Powerpoint, features in
MS Excel and Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs) in MS Word know all
too well the challenges. These desktop productivity tools still prevail
in most product planning organizations. However as product and market
complexity increases, these applications quickly fall far behind the curve
for many reasons including:
* Data is distributed and not readily shared, residing
on individual's desktops and local machines
* Documents are potentially out-of-date as soon as they are published
* Spreadsheets lack the versatility necessary for detailed planning analysis
Even with enterprises adopting corporate intranets and document management systems, documents might be shared or centrally available but the data they contain still remains disconnected from other pertinent planning data.
It should surprise no one that software companies have turned to other systems to try and tame their product and market data (software companies just can't turn down the opportunity to stretch systems beyond their intended use!). As an example, defect tracking systems and requirements management systems are sometimes used to try and "bridge the planning divide". However these systems simply were not designed for planning - they track data (and track it well). But when it comes to constructing and analyzing product roadmaps and plans, no amount of gymnastics makes the system really workable.
Enter Enterprise Product Planning Solutions
A new breed of application is now emerging aimed squarely at tackling
the complexities associated with product planning, and dislodging desktop
applications as the tools of choice for product managers. These enterprise
solutions, such as Accept Software's Accept Planner 2tm platform, provide
an immersive environment that unites the different organizations and processes
that touch upon product planning. Previously fragmented data critical
to the product planning process can now be centrally managed and made
available in context.
Planning solutions do more than just centralize data - they directly support each of the inter-related product planning processes: portfolio planning, strategic market planning and product planning, and more tactical product/release planning.
With such solutions, companies are able to:
* Model a market environment
* Create market and product strategies
* Manage products and features
* Develop product roadmaps and release plans
* Identify engineering tasks and estimates to support plans
* Use scenarios to compare and contrast alternative plans using cost,
payoff, and alignment analysis
* Perform what-if analysis and making trade-off decisions
* Optimize market-facing offerings
* Perform competitive analysis
Summary
Enterprise product planning solutions offer great potential for increased
product planning effectiveness. However it is important to remember that
technology alone is not a "magic bullet" for planning success.
World-class high technology companies have understood the power of process,
and turn to enterprise product planning solutions as "process enablers"
once well-defined planning processes have been established. With the right
combination of process and technology, your company too can transform
the way you think about product and confidently approach product planning.
James Davies is Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at
Accept Software Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise product
planning solutions for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Accept Software's
flagship product, Accept Planner 2, provides a fully integrated, collaborative
product planning solution that allows software companies to translate
product strategy into winning, tactical product plans. For more information
on Accept Software, visit their web site at www.acceptsoftware.com.
Copyright 2003, Accept Software Corporation. All rights reserved.
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Brian Lawley runs the 280 Group LLC, a Marketing and Product Management services firm in the Silicon Valley Bay Area. If you need an acting Vice President, Director, or Product Manager/Marketing Manager, the 280 Group can provide you with hand-picked, high-quality talent. For assistance with product launches, writing market requirements documents, customer research, developing sales tools, competitive analysis, branding, positioning, pricing or other Marketing or Product Management tasks contact the 280 Group.
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