Effectivus Product Management » for inventors and start-ups

How the iPad could change the world

Chris — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:29:56 +0000

The gushing praise for the iPad is now turning into concrete numbers as this last week analysts have been clambering over each other to predict that Apple will ship.

Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster originally expected iPad sales of 2.8 million in 2010. Then Morgan Stanley upped the ante to 6 million, before their analysts Katy Huberty and Mathew Schneider reported that iPad suppliers are forecasting 8 million to 10 million iPad shipments in calendar year 2010, double the previous estimate of 5 million.

I know nothing of this. As a consumer I have felt the need for some years for a handy internet browser that would always be on and could be used anywhere in the house. There is the Ocado order to be completed in the kitchen, whilst checking the contents of the fridge. Then there is follow up research to settle arguments over dinner and digging into schedules and program details the few times we actually sit down and watch the television.

Is the iPad the device to do this? I don’t know, but I do know that $699 seems a bit steep for the whatever additional benefit it might have over my $300 netbook, which by the way, supports Flash.

But I can see one way in which the iPad could change the world.

Read the rest of How the iPad could change the world

Steamed FUD

Chris — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:00:05 +0000

Like so many things invented elsewhere[i], the high-tech industry has grabbed the marketing ploy of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) through disinformation and made it all their own.

The idea is simple. Put just enough doubt into the minds of your customers that there is something dodgy about a competitor, or their product, so as to instil enough FUD to stall or reverse a buying decision.

A classic was a SEGA marketing campaign with the slogan “Genesis does what Nintendon’t”.

Let’s face it; FUD is the last defence of the desperate. You just know that the corporate marketing barrel is empty when a high-tech firm turns to FUD. It implies that you can’t differentiate your product, you are haemorrhaging customers and your stock has hit the floor.

If that’s the case then your CEO will be purple in the face and with steam coming out of his ears (despite the fact that it’s probably his fault that you’re in the situation in the first place). Who is he going to call? We’re going to reach for anything we can use, aren’t we? So let’s look at the different ways you can use FUD.

Read the rest of Steamed FUD

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: marketing, pricing, specification

Don’t touch me there!

Chris — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:07:18 +0000

Great story in New Scientist on Skinput (the product of Microsoft Research) which can project an image of buttons onto the skin, and then recognise which button you have pressed using body acoustics.

I’m struggling to imagine the type of muli-user interaction that this could lead to…

Pricing

Chris — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:20:21 +0000

A friend and client was kind enough to point out a deficiency in my web site the other day.

“What about pricing, Chris? I can’t find anything about it on your site.”

Sigh.

All of us wise students of marketing know that Price is just one of the 4P’s (or 7P’s, or 47peas in a pod), and that it is the offering that our customers buy into. We know that the whole product is so much more than just the price, but we also have to set a price. At some point, we have to pin our colours to the mast and give a price; no vagueness, not a variable, but a definitive number. That is tough.

I thought I had better refer to one of the “great men” of modern management theory: Michael Porter. I duly looked up “price” in the index of Competitive Strategy and found a section entitled “Correct Pricing”. Only a “great man” could simplify the topic to the binary opinion that there is “correct” and “incorrect” pricing. Pah!

Your average management books (and maybe the less than average ones too) cover pricing with a number of different strategies. It is telling that you find it covered in Economics, Marketing, Strategy, Finance. Each approach tells us something about your Product Management and Marketing team.

So, for the first, and probably last time, here is the Effectivus guide to pricing strategies…

Read the rest of Pricing

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: marketing, MBA, pricing, product, theory

Barriers to adoption

Chris — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:58:12 +0000

Ever get the feeling that you are working in a mental asylum? Of course, I’m not talking about any of my client companies. They are all completely sane and sensible. I’ll skip over the fact that the defining experience of working in one of their offices is being pelted with Nerf gun pellets at regular intervals.

Ten years ago I had the interesting experience of moving from what had been a start-up to a big corporate. Not only was Kodak huge, it had a lot of history, it was based on the other side of the continent and it was an old time manufacturing company that was going down the tube but had yet to face up to the fact. You can still see it struggling with this in recent advertisements in American Cinematographer: “Film No Compromise”. Wake up and smell the coffee Kodak, film was dead 10 years ago.

One of the wackier things I discovered there (and it was a year packed full of wacky stuff) was George Eastman’s devotion to the International Fixed Calendar. In 1926, George wrote about “The Importance of Calendar Reform to the Business World”. In this short article, he explains how the variations in the length of the calendar month cause all sorts of problems with the proper management of a modern business. I’m sure you are aware of this and have frequently stumbled over the 11% difference between the length of March and February or the shocking 17% difference in the number of working days in those months. And, that’s not even mentioning the vexations of a “wandering Easter”.

Read the rest of Barriers to adoption

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: film, management, marketing, users

What the Dog Saw

Chris — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:21:57 +0000

I can find almost any topic interesting if presented well. In fact, I love being given a glimpse into the normally hidden world of a new specialty. Not only do you learn about stuff you would never normally encounter, but you invariably get a view of the alien culture of those who inhabit this strange new realm. As I learn about a new topic my mind is constantly searching for analogies between it and topics I understand or experiences I have, and then, “POW!” I get a revealing insight into something completely different. I wish this inquisitive habit mean that I was a Polymath or a Renaissance Man, but sadly I’m more of a butterfly generalists, flitting from one subject to another.

As I write this, I have my media player in random mode and am delighted by it switching from Stéphane Grappelli to Indigo Girls.

I do have a deep respect for those who combine my interest with real knowledge and Malcolm Gladwell never fails to impress. In “Open Secrets” in his collection of essays, he touches on Enron, Al Qaeda, Nazi Propaganda, Prostate Cancer, and the Cold War, all in search of a clear differentiation between “Puzzles” and “Mysteries”.

Read the rest of What the Dog Saw

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Book review, marketing, MBA, writing

Sketching User Experiences

Chris — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:31:34 +0000

In the late ’80s when I first began contributing to commercial products at Spaceward I came across a book which opened my eyes to the issue of how we interact with products and particularly software products. It was “Readings in Human-Computer Interaction” edited by Baecker and Buxton and changed the way I thought about my products in a fundamental way. Bill Buxton’s latest book has had a similar effect.

Reading “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” feels like leafing through a designer’s sketchbook, a sketchbook of a lifetime of contributing to designing high tech products. Ideas come at you from all angles and then drill down into incredible detail before spinning off in another direction.

Bill Buxton has worked at both EuroPARC and Xerox PARC, Silicon Graphics, Alias Wavefront and most recently Microsoft Research. He has been lecturing and writing on the human computer interaction for 30 years.

Read the rest of Sketching User Experiences

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Book review, design, UI, users

Samsung Tic Toc

Chris — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:28:01 +0000

What were they thinking about? What can possibly have got into the Samsung engineers’ minds, let alone the marketing guys, to make them think that the Tic Toc was a good idea?

Announced at CES, the Tic Toc is an incredibly small MP3 player which has but one button. You control it by turning this way or that, or shaking it quickly or slowly. As the power says: “Easily shift through a choice of four play modes with a simple shake of the wrist”…”through the force of gravity”.

You can just imagine the thought process:

We could make an MP3 player much smaller if it did not have to have buttons or a screen on it (a bit like saying a car could be much more efficient if only it did not have to carry passengers).

I know, we play the Wii by shaking the controller, we could do the same with our MP3 player.

Oh, wow, now we’d need to watsit, a thingy and a 9v power supply…

Meanwhile in the marketing department… “an MP3 player with no buttons, no one has ever done that before, we’ve got to show it at CES”.

Read the rest of Samsung Tic Toc

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fun, product, specification

Effectivus’s predictions for 2010’s technology products

Chris — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:51:00 +0000

This last week the technology press has been agog with 3D TVs, Slates and Google’s Nexus One at CES, and predictions for the next decade. I wasn’t there. I don’t mind too much because Vegas is so unreal that it is easy to get carried away with the marketing hype and miss the big picture. So, to offer a little balance, I’d like to propose some alternative predictions for the next decade.

I think that in a world running out of resources it is time for the technology industry to grow up and shoulder its responsibilities. The planet is running out of food, land, water and energy which is pretty bad. But it also running out of scarce metals and minerals which are required to build our high tech playthings. This is going to be tough because most technology products are bought to replace perfectly serviceable products with only a small margin of additional functionality, and sometimes little, or negative, additional benefits[1].

Read the rest of Effectivus’s predictions for 2010’s technology products

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: design, lifecycle, vision

A (very) long adoption curve

Chris — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:15:53 +0000

We gathered around the screen, poking and prodding at it, experiencing for the first time the fun of finger painting using a digital paint system and a touch sensitive screen. The date? 1981. We were in the Royal College of Art computer lab, which used to occupy a fine Georgian building facing onto Kensington Gore. The computer was an Altair 8800; a proper computer with switches and lights on the front panel and an 8 bit external framestore. The paint program had been written by Brian Reffin Smith and we’d been lent one of the first commercial touchscreens (actually a clear screen to go in front of your monitor). I mention this because, finally, touchscreen computers are starting to make an impact in the mass market. That’s just 28 years later. In fact the first research touchscreens came out of the labs in the 1960s and the first commercial touchscreen computer (the HP-150) came out in 1983. What’s the betting that anyone looking to commercialise touchscreen technology would have written a business plan that foresaw consumer adoption as taking somewhere between 2 and 5 years. It’s just so good, so obvious, folks are bound to adopt it quickly. Any VCs out there invested in technology that they expect to reach the mass consumer market in 50 years? Thought not.

Read the rest of A (very) long adoption curve

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: lifecycle, MBA, theory

Effectivus Product Management » for inventors and start-ups

How the iPad could change the world

Steamed FUD

Don’t touch me there!

Pricing

Read the rest of Pricing © Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: marketing, MBA, pricing, product, theory

Barriers to adoption

What the Dog Saw

Sketching User Experiences

Samsung Tic Toc

Effectivus’s predictions for 2010’s technology products

A (very) long adoption curve

Read the rest of Pricing

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: marketing, MBA, pricing, product, theory