Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
From: iank@microsoft.com (Ian Kennedy)
Subject: IBM employee flames IBM marketing incompetence
Message-ID: <1992May02.235846.24967@microsoft.com>
Date: 02 May 92 23:58:46 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corp.
Keywords: Sound familliar?
Lines: 298


The following comes from na IBM internal message base system. It made
its way to Microsoft via a local BBS.

Amiga users will find this post very familliar. If feels good
to know C= isn't the only inept company out there! :)

So much for OS/2.... 

|
|    *** WARNING: LONG (250 lines) AND RABID (what else?) APPEND ***
|
|    Well kids, it's May 1. Do you know where your "exciting and agressive"
|  advertising is? Can you walk into any software store, picked at random,
|  locate OS/2 on the shelf easily due to it's prominent dealer display,
|  pay for it at the counter at the low upgrade price available at the
|  800#, and take it home with you? If you ordered it through the 800#,
|  can you call that number, have the phone answered quickly, and have
|  the person at the other end of the phone tell you *exactly* where
|  in-process your order is, and *exactly* when you'll get it?
|
|     Me neither. I doubt if anyone would have the gall to put forth the
|  claim that we have "flooded the distribution channels" and launched
|  an ad campaign that leaves us "weak at the knees" and "takes our breath
|  away". It is time to prepare what used to be called a "bill of
|  particulars". Not that they will do us any good, since no one is
|  listening nor would they be able to effectively apply these lessons
|  at this late date. But the facts must be dragged, kicking and screaming,
|  into the light. We are powerless to fix any of the items contained in
|  the list outlined below, but we can at least send a signal that says
|  WE NOW KNOW THE SCORE.
|
|  *DISTRIBUTION ROLLOUT-
|
|    The benchmark for success of the OS/2 distribution process must
|  surely be "OS/2 will be available everywhere DOS is available". Based
|  on this statement, which was made publicly and often, our distribution
|  rollout has been a disaster.
|
|    - Egghead, with whom we have a corporate account for purchasing our
|      software, has outlets that look like "WindowsWorld". They know
|      who butters their bread, and it sure isn't IBM.
|
|    - Sears, our "business partner" (Prodigy) refuses to stock OS/2. The
|      reasons for this are obviously political, and shrouded in secrecy.
|      I doubt if we "grunts" will ever know what IBM did to anger Sears
|      so much. Dialogue recorded at a Sears store in Texas:
|      Clerk: "I advise customers to wait for NT."
|      IBMer: "Why?"
|      Clerk: "Well, Microsoft flew me up to Redmond last week to see it.
|      It looks real good."
|
|    As a member of Team OS/2, I spend a lot of my own time hitting
|    dealers and evangelizing OS/2. When I realize we are up against a
|    competitor who has the WILL and the SMARTS to fly a Sears clerk from
|    a little town in Texas up to Redmond to see NT, I feel two things:
|    shame at IBM's inability to meet this kind of competition, and an
|    almost overwheling sense of futility.
|
|    - There are about 20,000 Authorized Dealers ( and dwindling fast, from
|      what I hear ). All indications are that our efforts to get these
|      folks on board and support them in a big way are token gestures
|      with no high level of commitment to really working as *partners*
|      with these people.
|
|    - There are about 100,000 UN-Authorized Dealers. These poor mutants
|      are not even part of the equation. They will not even get the
|      minimal level of attention we plan to devote to the Authorized
|      Dealers.
|
|    - Every dealer on the planet -- authorized and unauthorized -- should
|      have been overwhelmed ALREADY by IBM's generosity in giving them
|      free employee copies, t-shirts, banners, trinkets, "OS/2 Days"
|      staffed by IBM demo personnel, etc. Instead, NDD proclaims that
|      Merisel and Ingraham-D are their customers, not the actualy dealers-
|      and certainly not the END USERS who visit those dealers.
|
|   - From some notes I've seen on Prodigy, as well as other BBS's and here
|     on the forums, it is obvious that the 800# operation was no where
|     NEAR prepared to deal with this thing. One can only cringe in
|     horror when one hears such things as "we're still keeping records
|     of orders mostly manually", and "we only have two tubes running
|     here right now." Didn't anyone understand that this 800# was going
|     to be the "first impression" that many thousands of people who had
|     *never* dealt with IBM before would get of IBM? Didn't the people
|     running this know WELL IN ADVANCE that they would be running a
|     mass-volume ordering and support operation? If they did *not* know
|     well in advance, why not? And if they *did* know well in advance,
|     why wasn't a WORLD CLASS PROCESS and a WORLD CLASS OPERATION put
|     into place behind that 800# BEFORE it opened for business??
|
|  The above facts, when viewed together like this, seem to suggest that
|  NO ONE was the least bit prepared to deliver on the commitment that
|  OS/2 would be  ubiquitous, high-profile, and "available everywhere DOS
|  is available". When our top executives proclaim "we expect sales of
|  2.0 to be in the millions", yet every day we see a distribution and
|  direct-ordering process that was obviously designed for nowhere near
|  that volume, one is almost forced to conclude that *somebody* is talking
|  trash.
|
|  *MARKETING ROLLOUT-
|
|     Let me see if I understand the concept behind the marketing of OS/2.
|  PSLOB owns the product, and they're the ones who will get chopped if
|  2.0 fails in the marketplace. But, NDD owns marketing and distribution?
|  What Kafka-esque madman came up with a formula for failure like this?
|  Because make no mistake about it, our marketing rollout to date HAS
|  been a failure. The shameful part is, it is a GLARING and PUBLIC
|  failure. IBM's "OS/2 rollout not with a bang but a whimper" is the
|  laughingstock of the electronic bulletin boards. The people out there
|  who predicted that IBM wouldn't have a clue in the world how to market
|  this thing effectively are having a field day at our expense.
|
|     On 4/22, Nancy Roath (Director, PS Merchandising) appended to
|  OS2ARENA. I honestly have to admit, I have a lot of respect and
|  admiration for any executive who's willing to "test the waters" and
|  append publicly to a forum; it goes against the way IBM has always
|  done business, and let's face it opens the executive to the often
|  free-wheeling "exuberance" we see out in forum-land. However, one
|  statement in that append keeps sticking in my mind:
|
|     "The media rollout is really starting this week, and I think
|  everyone will be delighted with the coverage."
|
|     OK, it's now 5/1. Who is delighted with the coverage? Can I have a
|  show of hands? Anybody?... Anybody..? As I thought. "Sightings" of OS/2
|  ads get write-ups in the forums that contain much of the same breathless
|  prose as the latest "Elvis Spotted In 7-11" story in the Enquirer. This,
|  if nothing else, is a sad commentary on the *lack* of effective and
|  agressive advertising.If the media rollout was in fact going hells-bells
|  by now, there would be NO NEED to post "sightings" on the fora; we'd
|  all be too busy being "delighted" by the constant subliminal buzz of
|  OS/2 ads that posting it on a forum would be *superfluous* because
|  EVERYONE would be seeing them! Up until a couple of weeks ago, I used
|  to do a tongue-in-cheek imitation of Nicolson as the Joker any time
|  one of those ubiquitous Windows ads came on: "Windows? WINDOWS?? Can
|  somebody please tell me what kind of a world we live in where a User
|  Interface that looks like it was drawn with a crayon gets all this
|  advertising???" Then Jennifer and I would laugh, because we both
|  believed that an equally pervasive and exciting marketing rollout for
|  OS/2 was coming Real Soon Now. I no longer believe that, and now when
|  a Microsoft ad comes on, I just sit there...and sit...and feel ashamed.
|  How did our marketing effort, which was proclaimed by people we
|  trusted as the most exciting thing they had ever seen, fail so
|  miserably? Some thoughts:
|
|    - Our market research people should be fired. Period. "Print adverti-
|      sing is much better in reach/frequency rates". Have these people
|      considered coming up for air? This is NOT 1961, d*mmit! TV is
|      pervasive, and with some of the high-quality offerings on cable,
|      it's not Homer Simpson or Al Bundy parked in front of the tube
|      with a brewski anymore. I want to see OS/2 *prominently* displayed
|      on CNN. Most people get their news *there*, not from "US News And
|      World Report" or, God help us, "Fortune". I want to see OS/2
|      *prominently* displayed on A&E and Discovery Channel. Most people
|      tap into the cultural and big-picture threads of today's world
|      *there*, not by reading "Time". I WANT MY MTV!!
|
|    - "The cost of TV is also very expensive." Excuse me? Uhh, excuse
|      me?? I'm not even going to get into what Microsoft is doing. Let's
|      take a small company like Intuit, makers of Quicken. The category
|      of "financial management software" is a real snoozer, but after
|      being blitzed at 530AM when I'm half awake, I find myself psyched
|      by this product. See comment above about our market researchers
|      coming up for air. Hello? Hello?? In the words of Jim Morrison,
|
|          " WAKE UP !! "
|
|    - Didn't Fernand Sarrat promise that our print ad strategy would be
|      "hard-hitting"? The ad that has everyone in goosebumps has two
|      glaring problems:
|        1. Those machines are running Windows. Why ... ?
|        2. The ad looks like nothing so much as sunset over a cemetery.
|
|    - Given the nature of the print advertising ( bland, innoffensive,
|      "safe") and the publications where we are advertising ( Fortune,
|      US News & World Report, etc ), it is obvious that these ads are
|      not seriously intended to actually *sell* any copies of OS/2.
|      Their real purpose is the usual: get the price of our stock up
|      a few points, plus send a signal to our Fortune 500 MIS accounts
|      that "Hey, yes we are serious about OS/2! Hey look, we're even
|      *advertising* it! Pretty exciting coming from IBM, eh? Of course
|      we secretly know that YOU, our dear glass-house MIS customers, are
|      our *real* target audience for OS/2. But let's make that our
|      little secret, shall we? Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more!"
|
|    - If we were serious about a print ad strategy, we'd have real
|      "Grabber" ads, showing screen images of WPS and the different
|      categories of apps it runs. The ads would PROMINENTLY proclaim the
|      following facts:
|      1. The upgrade prices, especially the Windows upgrade price
|      2. The fact that you do NOT need DOS or Windows on your machine
|         to run DOS and Win apps
|      3. The fact that "OS/2 is not just for PS/2's anymore"
|      4. The fact that "the new OS/2 is for the home and stand-alone
|          user, not just for mega-Godzilla LAN Servers"
|
|    - Marketing should have begun relationship-building with the industry
|      movers and shakers EARLY IN BETA. A couple of months back we all
|      read about Charles Petzold's disillusionment with OS/2 2.0. His
|      disillusionment came, not from the technical aspects ( which he
|      has maintained since the 1.x versions were excellent ) but from
|      finally realizing that, to quote loosely, "these people have no
|      clue how to market this thing, and they don't even know it." Just
|      a couple of days ago someone posted the comments of Jerry Pournelle
|      in the latest Byte: "Having told me <about 2.0> at my panel at
|      Fall Comdex, the IBM people promptly forgot who I was and never
|      sent me a copy." Gang, these "industry pundits" (Pournelle, Petzold,
|      Dvorak, Seymour, et al) are, whether we like it or not, among the
|      most influential people in our industry. Why were they not brought
|      on board early in the beta program, and then subjected to a heavy
|      dose of TLC and "relationship-building" clear through to rollout??
|
|    - Finally and most importantly, where in all our grand marketing
|      strategy does the poor lowly END USER come into the equation? The
|      Fortune 500 will be served by M&S, as always. NDD will serve the
|      Merisels and Ingram-D's, with perhaps some token, one-time presence
|      in the "Authorized" dealers. The End User - the real, live, human
|      end user, the person who actually buys this stuff and takes it
|      home and USES it -- is explicitly serviced *nowhere* in either our
|      distribution or marketing strategy. It is a sad commentary on
|      IBM's bet-hedging commitment to OS/2 when the best we can do
|      as far as end-user "relationship-building" at the dealer and User
|      Group level is the rag-tag volunteers of Team OS/2. A few weeks
|      back, I suggested a little "Zen Exercise" for the 'Teamers' out
|      there: "What if we were totally on our own? What if there were
|      never going to be any real marketing or distribution effort from
|      the Static IBM, and the only way the End Users would ever hear
|      about OS/2 was from us Team OS/2 members? Would we still stay the
|      course?" At the time, I suggested this as an abstract "commitment"
|      exercise to do in the comfort of your own home. Never in my wildest
|      dreams did I ever expect that this worst-case scenario would be
|      a reality. Looks like I was wrong. Ooops.
|
|  * HEART SHARE AND MIND SHARE-
|
|     All of the above points to one inescapable conclusion. The 'Static'
|  IBM is firmly in the saddle on this, and they understand one thing and
|  one thing only: "number of units sold". They totally fail to understand
|  that this is about "Heart Share And Mind Share". This is about who will
|  define the desktop direction of the 90's, IBM or Microsoft. This isn't
|  about MONEY, it's about POWER. And folks, the Fat Lady has sung, and
|  Microsoft has the Power. After years of brilliantly marketing mundane
|  and trailing edge products, IBM finally has a street-fighting,kick-butt
|  product ... and we have NO FREAKING CLUE how to market this thing to
|  END USERS. As someone on one of the fora pointed out, Microsoft
|  understands something we are totally incapable of grasping: selling
|  software to the masses works by appealing, not to *reason*, but to
|  *emotion*. People sense the Dynamic Quality ( in Pirsig's sense ) and
|  *act* on that non-rational intuition of Quality. IBM never has and
|  probably never will understand that mindset. It can't be measured,
|  it can't be quantified, it can't be categorized and put up on a pretty
|  foil to show to some executive, so by definition it DOES NOT EXIST.
|  And we're starting to pay the price, folks; make no mistake. We've
|  seen more than a few appends in the last couple of weeks by people
|  who have been pushing this thing long and hard, but who now describe
|  how people are "slipping away" because they sense that IBM's commitment
|  to distribute and market this thing effectively is half-hearted and
|  bogged down in the usual bureaucracy. Many appends out on Prodigy are
|  starting to take the same tone ... often from people who have hung in
|  and been big boosters of 2.0. Their comments all seem to revolve
|  around a common thread: "You finally have a b*tt-kickin' product here,
|  but people can't walk into a store and buy it, plus you guys don't
|  seem to be able to market it to save your life!" We're losing these
|  people; we're losing whatever heart-share and mind-share we have
|  laboriously built up over the months. I personally despise "sports
|  metaphors" ( funny, from someone who's always using "war metephors" :),
|  but since the Vigorous, Athletic-minded, Manly Sort Of Fellows who
|  run this company revel in sports metaphors, here's one that might
|  sink in:
|
|     We're pushed back to our own 5 yard line. The other team has the
|  ball. Our front line consists of people whose only athletic abilities
|  are golf and polo. Our backfield consists of mentally unfocussed and
|  useless veterans with busted-up knees and a teary-eyed nostalgia for
|  the days when "Our Team Could Lick Anybody". Oh, and our quarterback's
|  behavior has the fans in the crowd wondering if maybe he isn't getting
|  paid off by the other team to drop the ball just a bit too often.
|
|     Many of us have been hammering away trying to get someone somewhere
|  in a position of authority to wake up to the changing and Dynamic
|  nature of this end-user market that we have addressed in such a
|  blundering way to date. I know several people ( including myself )
|  who have "worked within the system" trying to make The Powers That
|  Be listen, with virtually zero results. The fact that the OS/2 2.0
|  rollout has been such a combination of Keystone Kops distribution and
|  "yawner" advertising should tell us what we need to know: that we are,
|  to quote a passage from Neuromancer,
|
|    "Voices, mon, Voices ... cryin' inna wilderness ... "
|
|  Steve Gallagher TEAM OS/2 McLean Virginia  (HGXG49A at PR*DIGY)
|                               --
|  "We're Through Being Cool"   (8-(
|                               --
|
|
-- 
/* It's not a cruise... It's the Love Boat*/
/* Iank@microsoft.com                     */
/* I want my 32bit chip set               */