Think of marketing as the steering wheel of the company. It justifies new businesses, sets product direction for existing ones, does business development, makes proposals to the company steering groups, pulls together market analysis data, does the business case, the launch plan, the go to market plan...marketing in essence "runs" the company.
I'm sure a marketing guy thinks "marketing runs the company".
Let me assure you, it doesn't. It is necessary, but in the end, the numbers dictate what you do.
We saw a PDA 20 years ago...it was too early.
ROTFLMAO. Exactly the problem IBM has. Everything is too early or too late.
Let's be honest here: IBM made the biggest business blunder in corporate history by not having the vision to understand what the PC was. And they let it get away from them.
I can tell you that from the moment I built my first hobbiest computer off the cover of Popular Electronics, there was no doubt in my mind what would happen with it. I knew it. My teacher in grad school knew it, with a class project to interface an IBM Selectric to a hobby computer. Nobody was even making affordable printers for them at the time.
Thousands of others who were doing the same things knew. Yet, 7 or 8 years later, IBM still couldn't figure it out. And they allowed, not only Gates to walk away with the Operating System (dumb, dumb, dumb) they didn't have the vision to recognize how big the hardware business would become.
It is bizarre in retrospect.
In the early 80s, I was doing a project for the marketing department of a well-known soft-drink manufacturer. We needed 100 MB of data storage on a little Tandy micro running XENIX to do the project. I talked to management at Tandy at the time, and explained, "Hey, this 8MB drive you've got is great, but we could do a lot more with 100MB". I was told, "We don't believe users of these computers have those kinds of needs and we don't envision EVER building a 100MB hard drive for one".
I would say IBM's vision and Tandy's vision were roughly the same. Just totally clueless. No idea what the customers needed or wanted. No understanding of where the technology was headed.
Now, I'm sure the Big Iron marketing department had some idea where THEY were going. But please, don't come here presenting IBM as some kind of visionary. They aren't. I'm not sure if they ever have been. And I doubt they ever will be. |
