Flash and Java on the iPhone

I just love this kind of stuff ... don't you ?

I mean the kind of stuff when people leap on band wagons without THINKING !!!!

Flash and Java on the iPhone - Similar Problems, Similar Fate

"It turns out, however, that they hadn't. [Ed - thought] All they had done was follow the live blogging of Apple's March 6 event and, on hearing that the SDK beta was being released that day, signaled their PR department to announce the impending arrival of Java on the device. Not once did they stop to think whether it would actually be possible or not. They had no clue how they would do it and yet there was Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing for the company, making a public announcement about it.

Right on cue, and as if to ensure that no one would miss the joke, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced that they were working on a Flash media player specifically for the iPhone (full article available only to paid subscribers) and would leverage the power of the SDK to bring it to the device. Apparently, he too had overlooked the limitation of unforeseen applications on the iPhone when Steve Jobs was announcing it onstage. Thankfully, they'd realized that it wasn't going to be as simple as just wishing for it and had issued a retraction by the next day, along with the assurance that they still intended to have a nice chat with Jobs about this little issue.

Seriously, how hard is it to pay attention, people?"

Passed on - with thanks to : Apple Matters

Consultants

Incoming EMail From Part Of My Network ....

Report from the National Audit Office (NAO) at the very end of 2006:

"following a long and costly analysis, that management consultants were of absolutely no use to mankind whatsoever, despite the £3 billion of public money we spend upon them annually."

Let’s be clear: it did not say that management consultants were sometimes of no use, but that sometimes they were terrific. It said, per se, management consultants are absolutely useless, full stop. In the three years leading up to the NAO report, spending upon ‘outsourcing’ to the likes of xxx and yyy (and surely those names should have given the game away) increased by 33 per cent.

There was one glorious example of outsourcing cited: Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs outsourced the problem of needing to save £105 million in labour costs. This they did, successfully, to a team of management consultants who charged them £106 million.

Software Marketing in a Recession

Vendors don’t have to slash budgets but they do need to reposition investments to emerge from a downturn unscathed.

By Glenn Gow, Crimson Consulting Group

Are we in a recession? Maybe, maybe not. Many of you have worked through the most recent recession of 2001 – 2003. For most of us, and particularly those of us involved in software marketing, “bad” doesn’t quite describe how bad it was. Anything purchased by, or influenced by IT was hit hard.

This time will be different. Software won’t get hit as hard – but it will suffer along with the rest of the economy. Vendors that shape their marketing strategy for the downturn will emerge stronger when economic growth returns.

During the current slowdown, it is likely that business software will be less impacted than other sectors. IT spending will likely grow slowly; it will probably not decline. Consumer markets are likely to be harder hit than business-business (B2B) markets.

Many enterprise software solutions are accurately positioned as improving efficiency and productivity. Hardware providers have a harder time defending that argument (can you say, “virtualization?”) Another saving grace is that for most of us, the U.S. market represents a smaller percentage of overall revenues and profits than in the last recession.

Smarter Marketing During a Downturn
Let’s assume that at least the U.S. economy will be in a recession and that as software marketers, we need to work within that reality.

Historically, software companies cut marketing first and deepest. However, for most companies, this is a mistake. To quote one of my Harvard professors, John Quelch, “It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.” It’s my contention that this applies to marketing investments as a whole, not just advertising.

Here are some tips for how software companies should alter their marketing strategies, just in case a recession is reality.

1. Spend smarter
You may spend less on marketing. Not because marketing should be cut first or most (it most certainly should not), but rather because your company may cut budgets across the board. In fact, by showing how you intend to spend smarter you will make it easier to fight for your resources (see no. 6 below).

By “spend smarter”, I mean create a clear-cut justification for the investment. While you won’t always be able to measure the ROI (this is marketing after all), you can have your people create a compelling business case for each investment. Then, when it comes time to justify the investment, you will have established sound business reasoning behind it. And that’s what the CEO and CFO need to see in a recession.

For example, consider the costs of certain tradeshows and contrast those with investing in blogs, podcasts, webinars, wikis, blogtracking, and online communities. Consider what you spend on print and non-web media advertising and examine web advertising even more closely. Chances are, now may be the time and the opportunity to do something you always wanted to do anyway.

2. Double-down on your current customers
Sure it’s more fun to get new customers, but it’s more practical in a downturn to provide better value (and get more in return) from your current customers. When customers make decisions in a downturn, they’re more likely to go with a trusted source. If they’re more likely to go with you, then you want to make it even more easy and obvious for them to go with you. Market to them. Enable your sales teams to be more effective with them. Ask current customers what they need from you. Care for them and they will be even more likely to stick with you if the going gets tough.

For example, is your license renewal team thinking about how to strengthen the relationships you have with your current customers, or are they just focused on selling maintenance and support? How can you reengineer their goals to contribute to this objective? Imagine if they became facile at consultative selling, or at the very least identifying where else in the organization your company could add value.

More importantly, now is the time for strategic account planning, and driving activities via a coordinated effort into your major accounts. Do your teams really understand the key business initiatives being driven within those accounts and how to create a value proposition that addresses their key business initiatives?

3. Outsmart your competitors
You have an opportunity to win market share from your competitors in a downturn. If you pay close attention to what’s happening in your target markets and how customers are reacting to a recession, you can act early and often with changes in product (if you can change it quickly), price, and positioning (especially as perceived needs change).

For example, in the last technology downturn, software companies became very creative in their pricing schema, creating many variations of software-as-a-service (SaaS) that enabled them to sell when their competitors were stuck in an old paradigm.

Positioning is often the easiest to change. If you coordinate gathering input from your strategic account selling teams, you’ll have invaluable information about what your key customers are looking for. You can modify your messaging to address the patterns that emerge from these discussions, before your competitors know what hit them.

4. Invest in Growing Market Segments
In every downturn there are market segments that grow faster than others. It’s your job as a marketer to help your company see and understand these market segments, and determine if you can quickly win business in these fast-growing market segments. These may be segments you’re already selling to, but not particularly focused on, or they may represent new segments – and new opportunities for your company. At the same time, you want to reduce your investments in the segments that will get hit the most in the downturn.

For example, in this potential recession, we see a slowdown in consumer spending, primarily in the U.S. How many of your market segments are dependent on consumer spending? How many are more dependent on B2B transactions? How much of your marketing effort is focused outside the U.S? Do you know which markets outside the U.S. are likely to grow the fastest?

Now is the time to know what is happening in each segment upon which you focus so you can make marketing investment decisions with “all the lights on”.

5. Support your channel
The average reseller has fewer than 10 employees. They will be hit more significantly in a downturn than virtually all software companies. They could be running scared.

These partners will turn to the vendor that supports them in a downturn. Extend financing to them. Provide more generous offerings in training, more sales attention and better technical support. Give them high quality leads. This is what they want the most and this is what they’re the worst at doing for themselves.

Finally, consider dropping those channel partners that you always knew weren’t going to work out anyway and recruit better partners.

6. Fight for Your Resources
As I’ve argued before (see ”CMOs as True Leaders”) it’s marketing’s responsibility to drive strategic issues. In a recession, this becomes even more important. When the CMO is not deeply involved in strategy, marketing is likely suffer from a knee jerk reaction to the challenge of cost savings.

This often means a disproportionate cut to marketing budgets and marketing headcount with disastrous results. First, marketing winds up playing a less important role, strategically. Second, a pendulum-swing of dollars and people begins, which makes it very hard to recover once the economy does. Third, the company ends up short-handed, completely reactive, and outsmarted by competitors and wishing it hadn’t made the cuts it had. It’s marketing’s responsibility to fight for its resources, and doing the five items above will help you win that battle.

From The HBR - early 2006

Like all revolutions in thought, this one began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, for instance, are willing to keep betting even while expecting to lose. People say they want to save for retirement, eat better, start exercising, quit smoking—and they mean it—but they do no such things. Victims who feel they’ve been treated poorly exact their revenge, though doing so hurts their own interests.

Such perverse facts are a direct affront to the standard model of the human actor—Economic Man—that classical and neoclassical economics have used as a foundation for decades, if not centuries. Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist.

The Full Article at HBR

HR Trends

My thanks to Fred Lange - HR Architect for this nougat ...

A roundtable for a group of execs met recently to discuss HR trends.
The following is a result of that meeting, 30+ conversations with
other HR execs and some recentpublications.

What are their top concerns ?

Healthcare Costs – Group Ins. anticipated annual rate increases 15-20%
Productivity – Connecting Profitability to People (doing what matters)
Balance – Increase in Work/Life Demands – 24/7 access
Graying – Retirement of Large Numbers of Baby Boomers
Workforce of the Future – Euro/Asia/America Economy
Talent – finding the skilled workforce (US workers 70% in companies
of less than 100 employees)
Ethics - Social Responsibility, Ethics, Capitalism (China & Brazil
challenge capitalism rules/regs)
Green - Man versus Earth, Green, Sustainability

Interesting side bar, more than half the HR execs said they were
working on increasing the "purpose" profile of their business in
their employment branding in response to boomers and Y'ers demand/
interest in finding companies that serve a purpose. (e.g., three
bottles of wine to choose from and labels read: first choice -- the
ingredients; second choice – the bouquet of flavors; third choice –
founding brothers contribute ¼ profits to breast cancer in response
to the loss of their beloved mother. Boomers and Y'ers take third
choice, and if it taste okay, they will buy more).

The Great CIO Business Divide

According to the survey, 92 per cent of CIOs encourage innovation, but only 13 per cent formally measure the return on investment it provides.

When asked to name the top issues preventing their success, 61 per cent of CIOs named unclear and unrealistic business objectives as the number-one barrier.

Legacy systems and undersized budgets came in joint third position with 48 per cent of the CIO vote each.
A lack of business involvement and interest came in fourth (42 per cent) and the IT skills shortage nabbed the fifth spot (25 per cent), according to the survey of 125 CIOs and senior IT staff in UK organisations with more than 1,000 employees.

Nearly two-thirds (59 per cent) of CIOs said an "increased interest and involvement of the business in IT strategy and planning" would help them do their job more effectively and 54 per cent asked for a bigger IT budget.

The Full Report at Silicon

The Top CIOs In The UK ...

... according to Silicon - can be found here