Conference 7.286::digital

    Sounds like really good news and long overdue.  Hope we keep heading in
    this direction.
    
    -Eric.

Uh...feel free to zing me if this seems overly naive...

...but instead of trying to "generate customer demand" for our product (build it
and they will come), shouldn't we be building what the customers demand?!


NancyT

    Please make sure that ALL valuable Sales LEADS will be followed
    through.  We are in business of manufacturing and SELLING information
    technology - Not in business of educating general population.
    
    For example:  After running all those Imagine Ads in the Wall Street
    Journal, none of the responses were distributed to the field sales
    force and market development specialists.  Amazing WASTE of Capital
    Resources in these economic times.
    
    Sales force will sell as soon as they get the LEADS.
    

re .3
>...but instead of trying to "generate customer demand" for our product 
>(build it >and they will come), shouldn't we be building what the customers 
demand?!

This is certainly not a naive statement. It gets to the core of the problem

I've worked developing a product for Digital, software
support and now customer support in the CSC.  From my
point of view, we have products that the customers want,
but they do not know we have them.

During a job as a project manager for a project
converting Honeywell Cobol to Vax Cobol, I was talking
with the MIS Manager and telling him how his people
could work better if they had one of our workstations.
He did not know about them.

Everything I hear about Digital's product, even from
market analysts that do not like Digital, is that the
products on the whole are technically superior, but if
nobody knows about them we cannot sell them.

I have to agree that some of our software product are not
the best, may not have all the features that others do.
But when I talk with a customer about DecWrite and they
say that it is better the product X, which Digital people
seem to be saying is better then DecWrite, who should I
believe.  My thought is I should believe the customer.

So to get off my soap box, We are, in many cases, building
what the customer wants, but they many times do not know
we build it.


dave.

IBM and Microsoft are very good at creating market demand. So are the big
three auto makers.

It has to be a balance between building what representative target customers
want and creating the demand to aquire these products/solutions in the remainder
of the potential customers. I good agency is at least helping with part #2 which
never was one of Digital's strong points.

>Per

    We need to improve the way we listen to the marketplace AND our ability
    to the articulate to that marketplace.
    
    There is a naive assumption that Digital NEVER builds what the customer
    wants. This is wrong. Sometimes we do, particular when those products
    have come from a set of consulting engagements (All-in-1, Linkworks..).
    We need to do this better because our miss to hit ratio is higher than
    our competitors. BUT as Per, has pointed out, if you dont let the
    potential marketplace know about what you have to offer and why they
    should consider it, then you are wasting your time. The best way to do
    this is by focused product promotion.
    
    A conjecture, the PC group did not become the success they are by warm
    fuzzy advertising designed to bolster our overall image. They are there
    due to highly focused advertising that tells people why they should
    consider our PCs along with others. They still lose business, but the
    ratio is much better and, due to exposure, the number of situations
    where they are actively considered is now a great deal higher.
    
    Several leading edge products that should have focused product advertising
    today that the Needham approach will not help:
    
    	1. Gigaswitch
    	2. LinkWorks
    	3. CasePlan
    	4. Our Hub and Router products
    	5. Forte
    	6. Mailbus-400
    
    None of these products can be the success they DESERVE to be without
    the sensible application of focused advertising. I see no resisitance
    to buying from Digital that they seem to have identified, I do see a
    total lack of Product presence in the markets that the above products
    target. 
    
    Even some of our VARS acknowledge they would rather sell inferior
    products to the above from companies that are willing to spend effort
    promoting and advertising. Even though the Mailbus-400 products are
    here today, have rave revues from consultants, we have some VARs who
    would rather wait for Microsoft's Information Exchange (or whatever its
    called this week) which is currently nothing but vapourware. The reason
    they give is that its an easier sell, Microsoft will ensure that the
    customer has been informed about the product before they even walk in
    the door. To sell our product, they have to introduce it from scratch.
    This is not good, a VAR of partner will go for where the cost of sales
    is chapest relative to return.
    
    As to the question of building what people want. We have a broken
    process. Information Exchange and Lotus Notes are logical extensions of
    concepts embodied in products we have had for ages. Many of the people
    in these development groups have suffered from the starvation of
    engineering enhancement even when feedback has told them what must be
    done. If we look at Lotus Notes, here is a classic example of a product
    that was done without detailed requirements gathering that met the
    needs of the marketplace. An example of someone who thought a good idea
    may be useful. Accidental Empires at work? Certainly the classical
    Digital Engineering approach that bore fruit. Under the "Requirements
    are God" world Lotus Notes may never have been built.
    
    Now look at its post-release experience. Lotus Notes listens very hard
    to the marketplace feedback. They initially bent very heavily to the
    demands of the Big-5 accounting firm that was the early adopter. They
    encourage 3rd party developers to fill holes they cant meet and they
    actively recruit VARS. Early criticisms such as OS/2 only, high price
    etc. are being curcumvented. The evidence is of a company that is in
    for the long haul and is actively listening.
    If we had allowed some of our products the same nurturing and the
    investment for them to grow there may have been no Lotus Notes today. 
    
    As Per said, we need to do both. We also need to back good ideas
    occasionally on our own market instinct, and then ensure that we use
    the feedback we have garnered to make the product we want. This would
    help to kill two phenomena we have in Digital:
    	a. the tendency to kill an idea at V1 due to criticism (which is,
    in reality, nothing more than good, solid market feedback). It always
    seems Microsoft are prepared to back a product for 3 versions to get it
    right. Look at the crap thrown at early versions of Word. But they
    stuck with it and by V3.0 they were one of the market leaders. They
    will stick with NT for the same reasons.
    
    	b. the tendency to starve products after V1.0 so they never get
    what they need in terms of engineering investment to be successful.
    
    
    Microsoft have the marketing savvy to keep promoting product despite
    the criticism. Where, in Digital, a poor V1 release kills off the
    product. In Microsoft, the acknowlegement that a few dollars spent
    promoting can attract vastly more people to the V2 or V3 product than 
    were put off it at V1 and even persuade those same people to retry the new
    version. 
    
    We need a new model for software and, despite what the hardware heavies
    say, we do need a software business.
    
    
    - John
    
    
    
    

    What digitals problem is stems from the fact that engineering efforts
    are started and defined from what the customer wants. But something
    magic happens during the engineering of these products and eventually
    what you targeted out to be a $1200 PC that had so many bit's memory
    and so many other bits of disk space that runs at so many bit's per
    second get's clobbered with new functionality, different pieces than
    originally targeted (remember what the customer wanted in the first
    place? ) and a slipped schedule and overbloated price.  Now get the
    sales force to sell it. When they can't who takes the stick in the 
    shorts......not engineering/manufacturing! but SALES. 
    
    And no one from the top down will change this mentality and put
    checks and balances in the process to prevent this phenomenon.
    
    I've seen this happen to just about every product that Digital
    ever built.  
    
    So, let's start a little nostalgia,
    
    When and what products were ever shipped on time, and at the original
    targeted price and functionality!
    
    chet

    "Feature Creep" is one problem.  Another risk of purely customer-driven
    marketing and product development is that, unless your processes are
    _VERY_ good, you can end up building what the customer wanted last
    year.
    
    The real trick is anticipating customer needs and desires so that they
    see a new product and say "Wow!"
    
    \dave

Some analysis of DEC engineering was done a couple of years ago,
and "requirements churn" was identified as a significant problem...

>Some analysis of DEC engineering was done a couple of years ago,
>and "requirements churn" was identified as a significant problem...

Unfortunately, in the process of re-engineering engineering, "requirements
churn" still played a major role.

Sorry, I couldn't resist ;-)

    
    I understand that Strecker's organization just put out another
    review process document....ie: the old phase review.  Why can't
    they edit that document and stipulate that under no uncertain
    conditions will product creep/price be allowed. And that pricing
    is done at the time of inception/funding, and NOT as it goes
    out the door to be sold.  There MUST be metrics put in place
    to ensure that we don't waste any more funds on engineering 
    products that are too pricy/not marketable, and don't meet schedule.
    
    The competetion is eating our lunch.  How can they do it?
    
    I know, but don't want to admit that it could be all the built
    in bearuocracy that STILL EXISTS in digital, cause that makes
    me sound like a whinner, don't it.  Well there are a great many
    people in this notesfile and others that believe it to be true. And
    also believe that if stopping that whinning will allow the problems
    to 'slither' under a carpet only to raise again later.  
    
    Hey, I'll take a little cheese with that whine!!! ;^)
    
    chet

 
Will we ever learn?

Big problem: Engineering should not have the luxury of churning!  Engineering's
customer, marketing, should keep engineering on-track.  Marketing should know
what the (market's) requirements are and keep its vendor, engineering, in-line,
working to meet those requirements with product and not pay when engineering 
is frigging around and not delivering.

When this company stops being an engineering-driven one and becomes a market-
driven one, we'll know how to make our good hardware *AND* software products
successful in the marketplace.

A senior executive from the software engineering organization presented to the
western region's sales support last week.  The general perception of the four
or five people I spoke to after the meeting was that this person didn't have
a clue, defending the message rather than listening to our contructive feedback.

Just now I realized that we should have had a similarly senior person from the 
software *marketing* organization presenting to us.  Marketing must drive the 
business.

Bruce

    I don't see that it makes sense that any one organization within a
    company (marketing, engineering, or manufacturing) should dictate.
    These three organizations have to make decisions in unison; otherwise,
    serious errors in judgement arise.
    
    Granted, engineering can produce something that can't be sold.
    But, marketing can also sell something that can't be engineered.
    I've seen both of these things happen in large companies.
    
    Whats needed to keep a company based in reality is strong leadership
    to keep ALL of the parts of the company working together instead
    of at cross purposes.  Anyhow, just my opinion.
    
    -Eric.

    Do you have a modified version of ELIZA that types these replies in for
    you?

    Re .18:  I was just thinking the same thing.  He can't be typing all
    that junk.  If you read it, it really is only a bunch of words tied
    together, with a few main words as the theme.  It has to be a program
    that puts that together.
    
    Thomas,
    	One word of warning.  If you take a girl out on a date, don't
    repeat what you've typed in here.
    
    Jim Morton

    unless he is dateing another ELIZA...