By Kfir Pravda
Ok, I am a marketer. I have engineering background, but I am certainly on the “let’s find the story” side than the “where to plug this router” side. And I can tell you, I think that standardization process needs more marketers around.
So now you ask yourself why, right?
The answer is simple – the current process takes too much time. As such, it makes standards irrelevant from business perspective. We are talking about SIP for ages. Skype has bigger market share. Why? Cause engineers and marketers set together and solved problems based on specific use cases. So, engineers should be happy to have marketers around – not for advice, but in order to sort out all the different issues on the table between companies.
Standards suppose to support services and products. Therefore, they are supposed to be based on some kind of requirements. These requirements should be, in my opinion, based on market needs. And market needs are represented by marketers, not by engineering functions.
So why in most standardization organizations we have almost no representation? Even IMTC, the organization publishing this blog have only one marketer on board (yours truly).
What is your opinion?
3 comments:
Well, the idea that SDOs are slow is not new... I don't know if the idea that SDOs need marketing is new or not. If you think about it, most of the people who write the standards are working for the companies, educational institutions and so on - and they are paid by their respective business to spend their time, do a lot of travel, and in the end, produce a technical document which will be then called a standard. Therefore, I would say that when companies invest into development of the stanrads, I would expect thet they will subsequently invest into promoting ( marketing) of those standards.
At the same time, I would say that actual phenomenon we are observing ( impression that standards' development is slow) is related to the fact that there is a right time for everything. It is relatively easy to create focused application ( i.e., Skype) just by being first and different. What's next? You are saying Skype is bigger that SIP - in which terms? Revenue? No way. User base - well, it is large, ok - but is it a source of significant revenue - nope. can it be if it will pursue the same model - I would argue that it will not. How Skype can grow? by opening up their network and making a push to become a standard... Standards are mass-phenomenon - they really become useful standards once they are actually embraced by the masses... Usually, there are some cool applications on the user (masses ) layer which then drive lower layers to standardise... While not making any claims about my age :), I perfectly remember that while TCP/IP was known, it was not a cornerstone communications standard protocol, and it's market share was not anywhere near NovellIPX/SPX and Microsoft NetBIOS (oh well, may be I'm not that young after all :)) - TCP/IP was only available as a special patch from Microsoft and was not part of the OS by default. It was not until Internet and WWW became a mass (!) product, the TCP/IP become an indispencible part of our daily communications... So I'm not sure how much marketing do SDOs need, or is it all only about the right time and the right place...
Nevermind what I said above : ), to make sure standard is actually a standard, we need to do interoperability testing, and as IMTC has unique experience in the area of Interoperability testing, we do need more marketing to promote IMTC...
Anatoli
Kfir,
I agree 100%.
All too often our best and brightest engineers spend 10's or 100's of person years building robust standards that subsequently fail to be adopted.
Is this because the standards are faulty? Usually not.
Often vendors and customers alike fail to understand the benefits of a standard or, in some cases, even know about it.
So, bring it on, my marketing friend.
Help people understand they would be faster to market, richer, and better looking if they would participate in the development and adoption of standards more rapidly.
-joe
I very much agree with you your idea , may cause I am also an engineer ;).
Web Satan
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