Posts by: Anirban Sengupta
“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”
More It is not expected that all the dates mentioned in the product roadmaps are hard deadlines. An audience is cognizant of the fact that sometimes product launches can get delayed due to unforeseen reasons. Yet consistently not sticking to the roadmap may lead the audience to question a firm’s credibility. A great idea would be to backdate the roadmap, to some extent, to demonstrate the compliance so far and then to open up the future.
More Not all products however enjoy the ‘soap & detergent’ kind of stability. Phones in 1990s were used for calling and today calling is one of the many functions of a phone. Cars back then were mechanical marvels and now they’re practically computers on wheels. In case of software and applications, the product life-cycle graph is even thinner and very well summed up in a comment by Reid Hoffman (Linkedin Cofounder): “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
More Getting back to the shop-floor example: what if you realized that you ended up buying a few million dollar worth machinery but had to retain the workforce to run the machines as per requirements? In fact you ended up renting a bigger floor to accommodate the humans and machines?
More The war for the new world is not just different because of the absence of a defender – it could be even more complex since the sockets itself may not be pre-defined.
More If a customer doesn’t need to make design changes to change the chip in a socket they are likely to continuously engage with multiple competing suppliers – not just to get the best price but also to secure supply. In fact in some cases customers are reluctant to design in proprietary chips, as they believe that having a single supplier for a product is very risky!
More For a company, a socket means a business. When they talk about winning a “socket” they mean winning a new business. For example let’s say a product uses a microcontroller – all microcontroller companies would be fighting to win the microcontroller socket inside that product and all other such products that use a microcontroller.
More Value-based pricing talks about pricing based on whether a product provides more or less perceived value with respect to the next best alternative. In the case of professional services however there is a slight difference — since there is the “human touch” involved we can’t be sure whether the next best alternative is a true alternative at all.
More Cost-plus pricers believe in understanding the cost of making a product and then adding a profit margin on top of the cost to arrive at the price of the product. Value-based pricers on the other hand are not keen at looking at cost or a target mark-up. Instead they focus on realizing the value that the product brings to the customer and then pricing it according to the value.
More When every opportunity is studied using Economic Value Models and priced totally based on the value delivered (and agreed upon with customer), we are heading towards a situation of easier wins leading to eventual revenue growth and market share increase.
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