The Worcester Group, Inc. Blog

     Early in my consulting career I worked for a DSS/OLAP software vendor that provided consulting services to promote the sale of the software.  Consultants like myself were involved to at least some degree in selling activities that included examining the customer’s business, making preliminary recommendations, answering questions and RFPs, and giving customized demonstrations.  That was all pre-sales.  The purpose was to get the business.  The demo was not just about the software: it was about our service.  It really is hard to evaluate customer service from a sales pitch and a handshake.  But if you actually do something for the customer (without doing too much) you have a better chance of getting his attention and, ultimately, his commitment.
     Fast forward a few years.  DSS/OLAP has evolved into Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence;  vendors are getting bigger.  Some are getting out of consulting altogether, relying on a network of consultant/resellers to promote their product.  Now, a free demo is not a custom demo: it is canned, web-based, scripted, smoke and mirrors for mass consumption.  “Look at the neat stuff our in-house geeks have dreamed up!”  And in truth, it is pretty impressive to see in action.  So how will it work in my environment?  If I give you a sample of my data warehouse, can you demonstrate slice-and-dice, drill-down, and your neat query features on our data?
     Sure.  Just not for free.
     I’m not unsympathetic to the reseller for being a little risk-averse.  I know, from trying to sell my services, how much effort you put in to even find, let alone close, one deal.  So doing a mini-consulting engagement on the “if-come” seems a little much.  But what we are really dealing with here is a sale of a product.  So consider the message that is being sent with a proposal to charge for a demo.  “We never go the extra mile for the customer.”  “This product is so complex we have to invest a lot of time to achieve the simplest request”.  “You want the product, but we want to sell you consulting.”
     Well, ok, you may say.  Why does the customer want a custom demo, anyway?
It’s called “due diligence”.  Enterprises launching BI initiatives a few years ago were entering largely uncharted territory.  Decision makers had no experience with either data warehousing or with BI software, so a software vendor could come in and make an effective pitch, and the customer would choose the one that gave the best price and the glitziest demo.
     Not anymore.  While the territory may still be new for SMB clients, it isn’t exactly uncharted.  Some of the decision makers may have experience with the leading BI products, which is both a good thing and a not so good thing.  They know at least one product, warts and all, and they are looking at some of the newcomers to see if they have something better. So when a prospect asks for a custom demo of your product, he is offering you a chance to overcome his negative impressions, and show him your product really is the best in the field.  Why on earth would you want to charge him for that?
     And consider the multiplier effect.  What enterprises is this customer affiliated with?  Would a sale here lead to a sale to a parent company?  Driven not just by the product, but by a satisfactory relationship with the vendor?
     It just seems to me that charging consulting fees to make a sale is not intelligent business.

Many years ago, I looked at the amount of disk storage on the computer I was using, and the amount of RAM, and the size of the word processing program it was running at the time, and I thought: this is so out of line!  How much of that program did I actually use at any given time, and how much was taking up most of my available memory?  And then I thought, this program is over five years old; there is a newer version available, but I don’t want to spend the money to upgrade for a few marginally useful enhancements.

And then I thought, one day no one will buy personal productivity software ever again.  They will rent it by the session from their ISP for next to nothing.  They will always get the latest version; they will never have to worry about the effect of upgrading their operating system.  Hell, they won’t even have to worry whether they have the necessary capacity on their computer, because the computer will have no capacity at all!  We will return to the dumb terminal of the 1970’s, but with WYSIWYG displays instead of green screens.

I think it’s coming.  Really.  There is a trend among some specialty software products to provide programs on line as a service.  A prominent one is Salesforce.com, which has long provided contact management tools over the world wide web.  Once upon a time, Microsoft gave away its contact management software with every copy of Windows.

Earlier this week, Intel showed off a concept laptop that was as thin as the Motorola Razr phone.  They did it by replacing the hard drive with flash memory.  Look, Ma: no moving parts!  What if this were followed through to its logical conclusion:  no memory, either!  A basic terminal that can connect with the World Wide Web, either wirelessly or through your house electrical system.  These things would be dirt cheap, disposable, and potentially ubiquitous. 

One drawback: personal storage.  ISPs would be more than happy to sell you all the gigabytes of storage you want, but I’m not sure I want all my documents to be kept on a public utility.

Another drawback: offline functionality.  You may find yourself in a time or place where you can’t connect with the internet.  Or maybe you just don’t want to.  We all want to be alone, sometimes.  A limited function, no-memory terminal is useless without that connectivity.  You’re better off with an old typewriter if you have letters to write.

But the fact remains, such computers would substantially reduce the total cost of computing for the average consumer.  An inexpensive, maintenance free gateway to the world would get a lot of people on line who cannot get there now, both in developing nations and in the developed world.  Further, the stripped down terminal would be an ecological boon.  Where, after all, do old computers go to die?  The stuff they are made of today is pretty toxic.  Imagine a biodegradable terminal. 

Will software developers and hardware makers get on board with this?  Does Bill Gates’ vision of the Internet Appliance include the demise of personal copies of Microsoft products?  And what about the ISPs?  Could they economically upgrade their capacity with enough application servers to obviate the need for any capacity on the client?

The development of personal computing today is about at the level of the automobile by the 1920’s.  The complexity of the machines had grown, but manufacturing technology had reached the point where the amount of mechanical knowledge an individual required to keep his car running was greatly reduced.  The car was more reliable over all, and there were specialists to fix it when it wasn’t.  And the highway infrastructure was growing, though it didn’t get its really big push until the 1950’s.

Computing is evolving as a convergence of many information technologies: radio, TV, the Internet.  There are some functions you want to keep separate from your TV.  But do you really want or need to spend up to a thousand dollars every couple of years to do word processing or Internet searches?

What do you think?

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