Amy,
<But protecting the brand is important too and having executives underneath them that protect it is key. The source
of Itanium's early perception problems is due to the media blitz (published interviews) on Itanium in 1997 that
eventually resulted in hurting Intel's brand. The engineering issues weren't really any different than other comparable
products in the industry, but the media blitz generated an exciting buzz in the industry and as any good marketer
knows, a poorly timed blitz turns into poison that is destructive to the brand. Marketing owns protecting the brand
and timing - and that means resisting pressures to blitz before a launch. Maybe it even means reigning things in,
quieting things down, or embargo'ing until product is commercially available. Some of the best early phase
enterprise marketing is done quietly, behind the scenes at large customers, in a reliable, non-hype fashion.
Blitzing before solid launch is taboo. As you once said, it's all about managing the soft stuff. >
Very good analysis.
Further spinning your words... the engineers know and knew what kind of timelines they were
looking at. With high-level meetings with marketdroids regarding Itanium, the marketing folks
knew they had big problems from several angles.
1) The timelines were much too long to massage. You can massage something that is about
6 months out (i.e. deflect criticism, build excitment and anticipation) to your advantage but
when lines grow longer than that you are in trouble.
2) Because of extremely long timelines you can't string the sharper analysts along. Note the many
analysts that have stayed away in droves from the Itanium story after year 2 (i.e. 2000) of strung out
timelines. So much so , that the best among the analysts (technology by the way, not business) have
disappeared as their Merced / Itanium articles 2-3 years out are nothing more than suck-up pieces in
hindsight and have disappeared into the void. One that disappeared is Michael Slater. Find a Merced
article penned by him today. Merced suck-up pieces of his have absolutely vanished. Contrast that to
Linley "Merced" Gwennap. His suck-up pieces are still publically available:
eetimes.com
linleygroup.com
"Even if IA-64 processors merely match the performance of their RISC competitors, they are likely to
dominate the workstation and server markets, achieving a market share in excess of 60% by 2003."
Now that Itanium is set to ship? , (Pleeze ... where is the crew?)
watch the revisionist history begin. The other problem with very long timelines is there are craters
left behind that the Wintel suck-up press and other Orwellian like-minded Intel drones can handily ignore , but a few recall and re-read their notes and tell us what really happened ... never mind the revisionists:
theinquirer.net
INTEL TELLS US TODAY that it is still on target to launch its Itanic 64-bit ship in the second quarter but
how can you launch something five times over?
Every year it launches and re-launches the Itanic but even if it does manage to re-launch it
yet again in Q2, without OS support it won't even get far enough to hit the iceberg. This
time last year, in another plaice, we gave prices for the Itanic for its official launch in late
July. Intel pulled the launch. Then at last September's IDF, we were told it was launching
again and then later on in the year, once more, the pilots were paying pilots. It's still in
pilot stage and it still needs an adequate operating system, unless you lot out there can
tell us differently.
---
Rob |
