TLF Blog

Positioning is like Lying

Good marketing positioning is like good lying. No, we’re not suggesting that you lie when creating your company and product positioning. Anything but, in fact. But, it’s remarkable how much the properties of good positioning resemble the properties of a good lie.

Like an effective lie, an effective positioning statement should be:

1. Believable. A lie that no one believes is rather pointless, isn’t it? Well, the same is true of your company or product’s positioning. If it’s not believable, then it’s useless. Ensure that the key elements of your positioning statement are rooted in truth, and that the assertions that you’re making about your company’s or product’s capabilities will pass the sniff test of a jaded observer who has seen it all before when it comes to the outlandish statements that a lot of software and information technology companies insist on making.

2. Consistent. A weak lie won’t stand up to scrutiny when judged on its consistency. Internal consistency – that is, ensuring that the various elements of the positioning statement are not in direct conflict with one another – is very important to making sure that the listener won’t just turn off their eyes and ears to your message.

3. Simple. Remember being a kid and trying to tell a lie to your Mom? You’d concocted a story so convoluted and complex that it was impossible to remember as you recounted it. A positioning statement is the same way. If it’s so complicated that even you and your sales reps can’t remember it, you’re guaranteed that your customers won’t either.

4. Compelling. What’s the point in telling someone something that isn’t interesting and doesn’t apply to them? If you’re lying, tell a lie that is at least somewhat captivating to the listener. In the case of your company or product’s positioning, it should mean something to your target audience. Which means you better have done your homework into their hot buttons beforehand. What’s important to them? What’s not? What benefits can they not do without? Find out, and ensure that your positioning hits those notes.

This works. No lie.

AS

Girl Geeks

A recent article from BBC news highlights the efforts of an industry body in Britain to promote IT as a career choice amongst girls. The backers of the program, dubbed Computer Club for Girls (CC4G) point out that women make up just one in five workers in IT. But surely that’s just a historical anomaly, right? Surely the distribution of geeks amongst the current generation of kids is evenly split between boys and girls? Well, no. The same one in five ratio holds for students taking IT-related degrees. Quite surprising.

This got me thinking: why don’t girls embrace IT as career the way their male counterparts do? Some pet theories…

• Carly Fiorina didn’t stick around with HP long enough to become the poster child for female success in IT. Besides, hardware just isn’t as cool as software anyway.
• Girls intrinsically understand that a life spent playing foozball and drinking Diet Coke by the case-load just ain’t that attractive.
• The obligatory cell-phone-on-belt-clip look is horrible on men, but unconscionable on women
• The phrase “the female Mark Cuban” brings to mind questionable mental pictures (easy, Mark, we’re big fans)

Anyway, seriously, tell your daughters, nieces, goddaughters, sisters, neighbours, and students that the IT world needs their brains, their drive, and their creativity. Not to mention their fashion sense.

AS

Gone Phishing

I keep a Yahoo! mailbox, mostly to use an address when filling out annoying response boxes and questionnaires.  Once in a while I go in and clean out the Bulk folder, and can't help but pull up some of the emails in there for a good laugh.  Of course there are the hundreds of ads for 'c.i.a.lis' and 'vi a gra' (sic), as well as the opportunity to help out some poor widow of a former African dictator by helping her spend her boxes of money. But more and more, it is about phishing.

At least the phishing emails are written using a spell-and-grammar checker.  In fact, some of them are quite convincing except for a few small things.  The latest ones that I received explain that there have been numerous attempts to access my online account.  They pick a PayPal or some other major bank to increase the odds that you actually have an account there.  They show a history of failed attempts, complete with IP addresses and originating countries, usually Romania or Poland.  Then they point you to a website where you need to go to enter valid information in order to reactivate you 'suspended' account before further transactions will be allowed.

Of course the website link is the dead giveaway.  IN a recent email, www.paypal.com looked like a link in the email, but running your cursor over it revealed something like www.imaphish.com/www.paypal.com/idtheft.html.  My mom may not catch this but I think anyone reading this blog would. 

Being curious, I clicked on the website only to find that it couldn't be found.  So, I went to whois and looked to see who the site was registered to.  Again, not found.  I can only assume that some government agency was made aware of this phish attempt before I got to my email (which was a week old), and shut it down.

Which got me to thinking.  If the government hadn't beat me to it, wouldn't it be fun to be a 'phish vigilante' and launch a Denial Of Service attack on their site.  But where would I get the machines?  Well, by targeting other phish sites to become zombies.  In fact, the whole thing could be run by a vigilante coalition that kept a registry of these sites to use as targets.  Viruses used for good not evil.  Maybe even off a grad course on it at MIT.

Of course the government has people running around taking care of this in more heavy handed ways (thank goodness).  I am sure that there are whole departments that are out there getting phish reports, and trying to track these bad guys down and throw them in jail (as well as shut down their websites).  The problem is, it is resource intensive (as is my posse approach), and is always one step behind the thief.  People get burned before the thief is stopped.

So, I got thinking.  In order for these scams to work, a domain name must be registered.  Unlike email based scams where the perp can go get a free, somewhat anonymous email from Yahoo or Google, the domain name has to be paid for, usually by credit card.  Of course in the case of phishing the card is probably stolen but not yet reported so as to leave no trace.

So here is an idea - why not have the equivalent of a 'Brady Bill' for website domain registrations?  Essentially a waiting period before the domain can be used.  This would allow for a notification to be sent to CERT or whatever government arm about the registration.  They could use combing technology to weed out suspect registrations and keep an eye on them the second that they go live.  More importantly (and effectively) this would allow enough time for credit cards to be legitimized.

Debate on whether the Brady Bill was effective will continue, particularly among the 2nd amendment advocate crowd.  But I truly feel that a waiting period on domain registration would go a long way towards deterring phishers and other scam artists, with little or no negative affect on business.

JM

What Does MacTel Spell?

Well, it's official, Apple and Intel have come together.  Apple announced yesterday at its Worldwide Developer Conference that Macs will start shipping with Intel processors in a year, with the whole line converted by 2007.

Of course the first side effect of this is the huge risk that current model sales will grind to a standstill as potential buyers wait for the transition.  Smart ones will wait even longer until some of the kinks are worked out.  Also, all Mac software produced by Apple as well as every other Mac compatible package (Adobe, Earthlink, lots of others including MSFT) will have to be ported to the new chips.  I guess it depends on the licensing and support agreements how many of these will essentially be sunk cost projects.  Apple already has a commercial product ready, called the Developer Transition Kit.

IBM chips are all about speed.  The side effect?  Heat.  In today's world it is important to maximize speed but keep the chip cool so that it can be put into funky, small devices such as iPods without burning a hole in the user's pocket.  Intel has that speed/heat combination figured out.

Of course the interpretation of this announcement (and conspiracy theories!) will abound over the coming weeks.  Leander Kahney has an interesting angle in his Cult of Mac blog.  The new Intel Pentium chips are dual-core chips that include a hardware copy protection scheme that prevents "unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard," according to PC World.  So, Leander feels that Apple will create an appliance similar to Tivo that will use iFlix to become a home entertainment hub that will allow you to download, store, and play movies - even send them to your iPod.  The DRM capabilities of the Intel chips were necessary before Apple could team with the major movie moguls.

Of course it is hard to predict how this will play out in the long run, but suffice it to say that this alliance opens a lot of doors.  Stay iTuned.

JM

Personal Surfing at Work

Do you use your on-line access at work for personal stuff?  According to a recent survey by websense, more than half of those in the IT industry not only surf for personal reasons, but would give up coffee before they would give up the ability to do so.

As an engineer back in the 80s, Tetris on your PC was all the rage.  It came with a 'manager button' - if your boss was coming, you could hit <esc> and the game would pause and a bogus spreadsheet would appear to make it look like you were working.

Of course these days, you can actually be 'productive' and knock off some of your domestic duties on-line, such as banking, sending our party invites on Evite, booking lunches, car maintenance, checking your sports fantasy pics. getting insurance quotes, shopping, personal blogging, instant messaging with friends and family and so on.  In fact, the survey indicates that game playing at work is on the decline.

To me the survey shows that the line between work and personal life continues to blur.  In fact, what is missing from the survey is the corollary, how many hours a day do the respondents do work on their personal time.

It interesting to see the disrepancy between what respondents say they are doing presonally online, and what their employers think.  Employers believe that employees are spending a lot more personal time on the Internet than employees admit to in the survey.  Same goes for games.  I truly hope that there is not a move by employers to try and curb this activity.  Of course there is already a lot of Internet monitoring and restriction that goes on - a friend of mine who works for a large hotel chain was unable to look at pictures of a trip that I posted in my personal blog.

We would like to hear from you.  Would you give up your morning coffee rather than give up the ability to access the Internet at work for personal activity?  Click on the comments button below this post and let us know.

JM

Will demographics change start-up investment?

There is a growing understanding that as baby-boomers retire, western equity markets will be under pressure as this market segment draws on their lifetime savings (Source: McKinsey April 2005).  So what will this mean to start-ups that are looking for new capital? Actually it is quite good news. 

First off, as most US, Japanese and European investors are most heavily into listed stocks and bonds, these will be the ones most under pressure. One trend that is expected to offset this withdrawal of funds is the increase in savings from the Chinese and Indian middle classes. Will these new investors take the place of the retiring ones? Time will only tell, but this instability should cause institutional investors to think twice about staying in most common equities.

Secondly, those remaining investors, faced with an uncertain (at best) market in traditional vehicles, will look for high growth opportunities to offset poor performance by established equities and debt. Obviously emerging economies will be high on the list, but foreign exposure will come into play as investors look to get local high growth to reduce the exchange issues. Investments in start-ups are net-new, and don’t have the down side of investor withdrawals. Furthermore, with possible high rewards, against a sea of uncertainty with limited growth, new investments may look positively glowing. 

Finally, with this net increase of investment from emerging nations, the industrial nation’s currencies will gain in value, further emphasising the need to invest within industrial nations rather than face potential currency losses on foreign high growth opportunities.

So, all in all, the next few years should be very good for start-ups looking for money.

DC

The Long Tail

A recent article in The Economist discusses the latest e-commerce buzzword: The Long Tail. The long tail is a notion taken from statistics to describe "power-law" distributions, a good example of which is books: a few titles sell a lot of copies, while a large number of titles sell relatively few copies. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, noticed that the long tail applies well to the economics of e-commerce. Simply, the sale of niche goods that would be hugely unprofitable if sold through traditional channels becomes profitable when moved through a virtual outlet with little physical overhead and no reliance on a local geographic market. Anybody who has ever bought an obscure book, DVD, or CD through a website can testify to the truth of the long tail phenomenon. Anderson points out that aggregate demand for niche items is large and growing, and that supply of those items drives demand.

The notion of the long tail seems to us to be applicable to the enterprise solution market. Point solutions -- delivered economically through an ASP model, and sold via the web and phone -- are trumping large, monolithic enterprise apps from the likes of SAP, which seek to be all things to all users.  As Anderson points out, business plans for e-commerce companies are rife with references to their long-tail-ness; long tail biz plans for nimble, niche enterprise apps vendors can't be far behind.

AS

Dave's Not Here

Dave Duffield, founder and former leader of PeopleSoft, has re-emerged.  If you recall, he left PeopleSoft, then came back to replace fired CEO Craig Conway in 2004 when the company was floundering.  He was at the helm through the remainder of the hostile takeover struggle with Oracle (which started in June 2003 shortly after PeopleSoft acquired JD Edwards), then disappeared when that battle was lost.

Duffield's new web site promises great things to come. In what could be perceived as a direct poke at Oracle (and SAP), he claims (correctly) that today's enterprise applications are not meeting the needs of the customers, and are too expensive to maintain and deploy, hard to use, and were built for the back office.  No news here, as every point solution for Supply Chain, HR, CRM, and so on has been making the same claim since about 1995.

Dave's new vision claims to solve that problem, using "a revolutionary approach to technology that includes open source, object-oriented techniques, XML, and web services".  Well, I think he has the buzzwords covered but that is as detailed as it gets at this point.  My guess is that he is building an SOA infrastructure to allow a modular approach to enterprise application development, plugging in application components available through open source or from SOA enabled point solution providers to build component portfolios for HR, CRM, etc.

While I applaud him for attempting to fix the current monolithic nightmare of today's ERP, what he seems to forget is that it isn't about the technology anymore.  SAP and Oracle have huge, well entrenched install bases, and will be next to impossible to displace in an existing account.  They will fight tooth and nail for their turf, both real and perceived.  They will also use their war chests to continue to acquire companies to fill holes in both their infrastructure and their solution space(s).

Duffield may have deep pockets and friends in high places, but he will need a lot more than cool technology to become a player again in this space.  Oh well, at least he has one thing right...  corporate headquarters is listed as Incline Village, NV.

JM

Are You An Infomaniac?

Ask your co-worker that question out loud :-)

We couldn't resist posting this.  In a recent article in Techweb News, using e-mail and other messaging technologies excessively can lower your IQ as much as if you smoked some weed, according to recent research sponsored by Hewlett-Packard.

According to researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry, there's a serious "Info-Mania" problem among British workers, who are so addicted to constantly checking e-mail and text messages during meetings, in the evening, and on weekends that their IQs fall by 10 points.

That's more than double the four-point plummet seen in studies done on the impact of smoking marijuana, the researchers said, and equal to the affect of missing a night of sleep.

HP UK commissioned a survey of 1,100 Britons and found that 62 percent were addicted to checking messages out of office hours and while on vacation. Half of them responded to an e-mail within an hour, and one in five said they were "happy" to interrupt a business meeting or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or telephone message.

HP has posted a guide to spotting Info-Maniacs, and putting a stop to the problem.  Of course, the best way to get this to true info-maniacs would be to mail it to them :-)

Are the folks at HP UK wondering if this is what happened to Carly Fiorina?  She used to be so smart, back in the pre email days of Lucent.  Perhaps the newly re-elected Tony Blair should ban Outlook, Blackberrys and other members of the email axis of evil!

JM

Software 2005

The Software 2005 conference is now a wrap.  This conference, presented by M.R. Rangaswami and The Sandhill Group, is now an annual event and attendance increased 35% this year over 2004.  It is an ideal opportunity for those in the enterprise software industry to see what's new and what's coming, as well as to catch up with old colleagues and make new connections.  It is also a perfect forum for startups to gain exposure as well as solicit funding and key partnerships.

According to Sandhill, there were 1500 attendees this year, including 100 press and 100 VCs.  Half of those in attendance were CEOs.  I spotted a number of them, including entrepeneur/CEO (now a VC) Ken Ross, Indus CEO Greg Dukat, Composite SW and entrepeneur Jim Green, former webMethods CEO Phillip Merrick, and a host of others.

M.R. has a rolodex that anyone would die for, and he put it to good use in attracting the top executives from major enterprise software companies such as Oracle, Intuit, McKinsey and others for keynote addresses.  There were also a number of breakout tracks on the latest trends in our industry, including SaaS, open source and offshoring.

There were a couple of unique forums made available for select startups. including the Launch and the Funding Forum, where startups were given a fixed amount of time to present their business plan to investors, who were invited back to the conference floor for further discussions if interested.  Mark Cosway, a member of our board of advisors and President of ActStream Technologies, participated in Launch, and reported new contacts with a number of interested investors.

After taking in this conference, I think that it is safe to say that enterprise software as an industry is 'cautiously optimistic'.  Venture investments are picking up, M&A activity is growing, and the overall buzz was a good one, after the last 4-5 years of doom and gloom.  Many of the people that I talked to had taken long sabbaticals after the dot-com bust, and are just now getting back in the game.

All in all, the feeling was that it is a good time to be in our business.  I hope they are right - I certainly feel that way.

JM