From the Yahoo board (from OldTimerInvestor):
First off, Dave B., do you care whether you get EDO or SDRAM if you purchased a computer today? I do. I want the fastest. Second, Professional Marketing is about testing premises. No one can say if "Rambus Inside" campaign will work. Not you, not Rambus, not the boxmakers. Are you trying to say that if a computer assemby company thought that the words "Rambus Inside" or something equivalent would mean more sales that for the price of the ink on the box, they would omit it? You conclusions are flat wrong.
OldTimer,
First, absolutely I care, but that's not the right question for two reasons. On the one hand, I'm a very knowledgable user -- I bought a $3500 PC in 1996 specifically because it had SDRAM (BTW, I paid the price for getting bleeding edge technology -- the SDRAM design wasn't final yet and when I wanted to upgrade I had to pay Gateway $300 instead of anyone else $200 for 32M because Gateway picked the wrong standard) so I'll be one of the first or so users in line for a Rambus machine. Well, maybe not the first -- I've learned that lesson <G>. More importantly, however, I wouldn't select an EDO system today because you can't buy a PC with EDO memory! Users do not have a choice today!. As I said in a previous post, the PC manufacturers and other device manufacturers are the primary customers for DRDRAM -- if Rambus/Intel can get them to adopt DRDRAM, then in two years you won't have a choice in your PC either. Buy a PC and you'll get DRDRAM inside automatically. Rambus will be even more successful if the end-user doesn't even have a choice!
With respect to Professional Marketing, one of the things I love about this profession is that there's never a "right" answer. It's all probabilities. You may field a promotion that increases sales 10,000%, but you'll never know if there was some way you could have tweaked it that would have increased sales 20,000%. You can (and should) test concepts, but you certainly can't test the same concept over and over and over, nor can you test every variation of a concept (incidentally, Oracle has the most amazing marketing machine that I've ever seen -- every ad, every direct mail piece is tracked and measured against targeted goals. This may not be unusual for consumer packaged goods marketing, but I've never seen any other high-tech company come even close.). What you can do, however, is learn from the past. Having marketed boxes, and having marketed products to companies that market boxes, I can tell you that it is very, very unlikely that anyone would implement a "Rambus Inside" campaign. Dell and Gateway will have it shown in their ads -- you'll know you're getting it when you order the system -- so why put it on the box? Compaq? HP? IBM? One of the cardinal rules of marketing is that you don't dilute your own image, and they're not going to dilute their image with multiple bugs on the front of their box when it's just as easy to list Rambus in the system specs.
Having said all that, I've already agreed that I could be wrong -- every marketing person makes their own decisions and follows their own avenues. Who knows what'll happen? Personally, I wouldn't put the effort into it. If I were Intel/Rambus, I'd focus on marketing to every single individual and company that designs products that need memory. That's a much easier audience to identify and reach. A higher probability of success at less cost. We'll see what happens, and I won't feel bad either way (though I'll be very interested to see how it works if they try it).
Dave
p.s. A lot of the success in getting design wins depends on getting the pricing premium down. The Toshiba announcement is already a step in that direction. |
