Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

Wikis, Blogs, and Search Engines are collectively fuelling a huge inflection across the interrelated realms of Technology Marketing and PR.

When putting together a post yesterday about "Virtualization", I instinctively looked to Gurunet's "answers.com" service for information on the subject: Enterprise Information Integration (EII). Woe and behold! Here is what I found at the tail end of the answers.com article on this subject:

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Now, I knew this was Wikipedia content repurposed by "answers.com", and I proceeded to clean up the article. The wikified article took a while to complete, because true to the "Wikipedia" ethos, I had to contribute knowledge as opposed to the original weenie marketing gunk. Its naturally easier to cut and paste marketing fluff for a misguided quick win attempt than it is to embed links, add knowledge, and discern Wiki Markup (but "Wiki" don't play that!).

This little exercise has broader implications for marketing as a whole, especially for the IT sector. The end of days for  "Misinformation based Marketing" are nigh! Wikis, Blogs, Search Engines, Web Services, and Social Networking are rapidly destroying the historically prohibitive costs associated with customer pursuit of facts.

I am very confident that product quality will soon overshadow market share as the key determinant for both product selection on the part of customers (this is no longer a pipe dream!). I also have increased hope that IT product development and associated product marketing by technology vendors will veer in the same direction.

Via the always-on network I stumbled across a great article by Pip Coburn that posed the following question: "should Microsoft benefit from the mess it helped create?".

The article discusses most of the key issues, but it should also have included and discussed he following question: "should Microsoft benefit from the mess that we let them create?". By "we" I mean the extensive pool of Microsoft product consumers, developers, and partners etc.

I have worked with Microsoft products (as a developer and user) for more years than I would like to remember; I have personally experienced the journey from Windows 2.0 to Windows XP (and played around with Longhorn).

I added my question to this dialog as without it's resultant perspective, history will simply repeat itself. If IT technology decision makers don't change their product selection and acquisition habits, then why should Microsoft or any other vendor change their ways? Especially when a perpetual promise-under deliver-repromise cycle works absolutely fine. This isn't rocket science, it basic common sense (but we know that common sense ain't that common).

Microsoft like most software companies seek significant portions of their revenue growth from product upgrades. In a sense, it inherently implies that these products will always be millions of miles away from the "silver bullet" promises espoused in the pre product release marketing and PR hype. Sadly, there was a time when Marketing and PR hype used to be about new features; a time when there was a clear line between a new feature and a fundamental product bug.

Buying products from any company simply because they have the largest market share is dumb! All it does is encourage other vendors to focus on product market share rather than product quality, which ultimately results in the following:

1. You basically end up paying (rather than at least being credited) for opportunity costs arising from all the time lost now your PC now works slower than you do.
   
2. You pay for bug fixes and architectural flaws instead of new features

Microsoft isn't a unique source of this problem, but hey! They are the largest Software Company (the one with the vital market share), and their software products are on some 80-90% of desktops on this planet, and the planet isn't at its most productive at the current time, and no matter how you look at it, this loss of productivity has something to do with the increased nuisance of desktop computing.

If Microsoft could just focus on its core competence (BTW - I can't quite pint point this anymore since they are in every software market that exists today), it would have at least have an iota of a chance in hell of cleaning up this mess.

Speaking of the Mac A little humor for the day, from one of my fav sites.

The Information Machine Check out this charming movie from the late 50's, developed for the IBM Pavilion at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels.

It's been a while since I've seen punched cards (which reminds me, I still have the first program I'd ever written, on punched cards written for the IBM 1130).