This week's technical quote of the week comes from Randy Holloway's blog:
" In the development community, Microsoft is seen in a better light than it has been in recent years. Another face of Microsoft is its marketing machine. There is a sterile feel to much of the marketing that Microsoft does. I think it comes down to an attempt to control the message. The more you try to control the message, the less effective the message will be. The reason is that people today can tell the difference between valuable information and canned marketing material. "
Source: Dinner with Scoble
This expresses concerns that I, too, have about much Microsoft marketing. It may have been possible a few years ago for marketeers to assume that readers of marketing material would naively accept what they were told. In today's climate that assumption is, in my view, both false and dangerous - dangerous, specifically, to Microsoft's future market well-being.
With the upcoming "Big Software War" feeding marketing material of low credibility to customers adds to the possibility of making current Microsoft customers become former customers.
More customer-focussed marketing material which meets customers where they actually are, rather than where marketing dogma would wish them to be, seems to me to be a much healthier approach to marketing.
Posted by Andrew Watt at October 19, 2003 03:37 PM