Re: Seeding the market (was Informix Directions)

Michael Segel (mikey@segel.NO.SPAM.KINGOFMYDOMAIN.SPAM.NO.com) wrote: : Cosmo Lee wrote: : > Tim Schaefer wrote: : > > Take care of the engine, and developers FIRST, : > > and the rest will take care of itself. I will be more than : > > happy to head up your marketing efforts, give me a call. : > : > Hear, hear: And to seed the market w/ developers of Informix - who will then : > evangelize to the rest of the company, including management: EDUCATE : > DEVELOPERS FOR FREE. : > : > This may seem like a radical idea, but it's painfully obvious to me that this : > is a sure way to get developers recommending Informix. It amazes me that : > companies don't already do this. People recommend what they know. Give : : No its not a radically new concept. : Its known as grass roots marketing. : : Read Guy Kawasaki's (?sp?) book on his job at apple. In case you haven't noticed (bold on) APPLE LOST! The 'grass-roots' scheme failed - dismally. Name me one example of a non high-tech company where you know the 'grass-roots' campaign was even tried. The reason you can't is that you never got to hear about the product; i.e. it failed. Read the Bill Gates memo to Sculley from 1984. : The problem that Informix faces is that they lack a marketing : director. This means that there is *NO* Market Planning nor : Market Research. Whatever problems IFMX may have, lack of market vision is not one of them. The reality is that selling commodity SQL engines is going to be hard. Fine. Don't fight that battle. Instead, go where the strength is. : I didn't want to trounce Paul B. publically since his is also : a supporter of Linux. The Linux thing is kind of orthogonal to the question of where DBMS technology is going. The Linux thing makes perfect sense in the commodity market; low cost, high visibility, high utility for the install base. But what I'm trying to do in this forum is to help clarify (to the extent that I'm able/knowledgeable) the IFMX product direction; to explain why it's necessary, and to set your minds at ease regarding the impact it will have. The install base will be unaffected. Did you guys see the numbers post restatement. Guys, IFMX LOST MONEY in commodity DBMSs. Not a lot, but enough to underscore the point that you need focus. : Informix has become reactionary to the needs of their : largest customers. Is this a bad thing? : : The short answer is Yes. If listening to the large clients and meeting : their needs was part of an overall strategy, then it would be : ok, however there is no larger strategy at Informix. Once again, the IFMX focus seems to be selling into situations where the problem is challenging and requires a stronger technical solution than the competition is providing. This is unrelated to the size of the customer: it's framed in terms of the problem/solution. In fact, I feel that IFMX will do a lot better with this strategy wrt smaller firms. Bigger organizations have less capacity to innovate and therefore to take advantage of the technical superiority of the IFMX product line. A factoid you guys need to consider is that the majority of growth in the US and European economies since 1985 has come from small businesses (emp_cnt < 500 ). Small businesses are aggressive innovators, who compete based on the way they deliver superior quality/service. An important way to differentiate yourself is with information technology. : Paul says that they want to focus on their higher end clients. : Ok, so that means you will only sell 1,000 or so units of Universal : Server a year and you don't need a world wide organization. : You become a boutique firm with maybe a handful of clients. : 1/3 of your engineers and a few marketing and sales types. : (Isn't this what happened to Cray? Or was that Unisys? Encore? : Damn, so many downsized companies, its hard to remember? ;-) All of the companies you mention here are hardware companies. The dynamic in software is very different. The key cost in hardware is production. Cray couldn't have afforded to churn out a million Crays a year once one was designed. In software, innovation is more 'chunked'. Moore's law doesn't apply. UDO is already a mainstream product. It doesn't do accounts receivable any better than SQL-92, but it can let you build systems that weren't feasible/possible. Most of you probably don't see how it applies to your problems (although check out the recent IFMX Tech Notes journal) but there is a huge market for the tech in problems that *aren't* being solved. : Or Informix changes their strategy, rebuilds their grass roots : efforts, listens to their conusmers, and does some market research. : : Informix has to wise up. IBM DB2's *universal server* has all the same : buzz words. So where is their technical advantage. (Technical advantage : changes every couple of months.)[Remember how Informix,Oracle and : Sybase used to leap frog each other with new and improved products, : with faster and faster benchmarks?] Right. I know a lot about IBM UDB (V5). So how to compete with IBM? 1. Focus. IBM's UDB lacks several key features; type inheritance, opaque types, an extensible API. Focus on circumstances where these are an important part of the solution. 2. Partnerships. IFMX has multiple text engine partners. IBM has, IBM. IFMX has multiple image partners. IBM has, IBM. IBM has IBM hardware. IFMX has everyone's. 3. Benchmarks. Seen an IBM TPC-C lately? : Informix has to start asking themselves the basic questions. : "Why Informix?" is a good place to start. That's precisely the question that the strategy is meant to clarify. "Why Informix?" - "Because no one else can do it." : Informix also has to realize that its the consultant or evangelist : on site that makes the sale. Not the salesman. All he does is : close the deal. Have you ever sold software? I used to believe this too. Then I worked for a vendor. Evangelists irritate managers. Consultants pick their nose in meetings. I still run 'gdb -p' for a living, but I've come to understand the lubricating role sales-staff perform. : In lighr of recent articles, most major companies are databased out. : For Informix to suceed, it has to look towards new markets. Don't for a second believe the crap you read in the compewter komiks. I don't know of any organization, regardless of size, who are in the business of stopping development. Hands up everyone who's company is saying "We're gonna stop gathering data now." The various DBMS companies didn't time it particularly well. There's a problem at the moment with market saturation; lots of big orgs bought 'unlimited site licenses'. Trouble is, the DBMS technology they bought the licenses for is now dated. At the time this was all going on, a thoughtful marketing type of my acquaintance opined that buying a software site license was like going to Digital in 1988 and saying "OK. We agree to buy Micro-vaxes forever." Sec