Yesterday I had a couple of meetings with CEOs of VoIP providers. Each had a list of the cool stuff that their company was doing. Patented technology. Cool dashboards. Etc. On the one hand, employees of a service provider have to drink the kool-aid. They have to be big cheerleaders for their service and company. That is a requirement for success. People who work for Coca-Cola, only drink Coke.
Yet the biggest blind spot in this industry is the navel gazing. Hardly anyone has any idea what is available in the marketplace. They don’t know much about the competition. They don’t do secret shopping or competitive analysis. It means they don’t know that what they just built is readily available already.
Also, they build (or buy) features upon features without any market validation.
Apparently they have forgotten the Microsoft Office rule: it was too complicated for most users!
This flies in the face of Henry Ford saying that if he asked his customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses. But Mercedes-Benz had built the first car in Germany 11 years before Ford! Ransom Olds opened the first automobile factory in Detroit in 1900 and produced 425 cars in 1901. The Model T from Ford rolled out of the factory in 1908. Ford was more about production and delivery than invention.
From my lens, I’m not awe-struck by much in this business anymore. After you have worked with 60+ service providers, there isn’t much new left. I am just plain frustrated that this industry has done such a poor job of sales and marketing. It is constantly about saving money, while also being a real hassle to get deployed.
There are 2 beliefs that just are not correct:
- Build it and they will come.
- The best tech wins.