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Summary: A marketing guy accidentally made an advertisement too informative, which made the useless, overpaid sales staff unhappy. A couple years later, the ent

Summary: A marketing guy accidentally made an advertisement too informative, which made the useless, overpaid sales staff unhappy. A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers.

jbooth 15y ago
Wrong lesson. The story was telling you something about how b2b sales work. EDIT: Also, since every sales force everywhere runs on commission, it's impossible for them to be overpaid unless they don't sell anything (in which case they're not paid very well).
alain94040 15y ago
Wrong. If you read carefully, it said (and I believe it's true) that the datasheet will not sell the product. Also true, it will actually be more likely to lose customers because some detail doesn't match the customer's goals. For products above $100K, having a sales person who can actually listen to what the customer wants, and tailor their pitch appropriately, is worth millions. No "useless, overpaid sales staff". Of course, your mileage varies greatly in sales :-)
- westicle 15y ago
  I would have thought a customer not purchasing the product because it doesn't meet their requirements (or some part of their requirements) is a net win. If the OP was correct that his technical specifications were exhaustive and accurate, a prospective purchaser would be in a good position to make the purchasing decision. Are we now encouraging sales through obfuscation and sales-person trickery?
jleader 15y ago
"A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers". This is wrong in several ways: A few years later, Convergent was bought by Unisys for $350 million (in 1988 dollars). http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unisys-says-it-will-buy-convergent.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unis... The MegaFrame wasn't competing with personal computers, it was competing with engineering workstations (Sun, Apollo, etc.) and departmental minicomputers (HP, DG, others I don't recall at the moment). Convergent's personal computer products were arguably less crappy than IBM's (they often were a generation ahead in CPUs (80186 vs 8088, then 386 vs 286, etc.), they ran a multitasking message-passing OS instead of DOS, etc.). For a while, they sold quite well in some markets (e.g. every U-Haul office in the country had a B-25 on every desk at one point in the early 90s). They lost anyway, because cheap crappy PC clones were so ubiquitous, and the resulting software and hardware ecosystem could out-evolve any specialized product from a single company.
kragen 15y ago
The market segment was still alive and well as of 2000, bigger than ever, and technically you can still buy SPARCs and POWER workstations.

jbooth 15y ago

Wrong lesson. The story was telling you something about how b2b sales work. EDIT: Also, since every sales force everywhere runs on commission, it's impossible for them to be overpaid unless they don't sell anything (in which case they're not paid very well).

alain94040 15y ago

Wrong. If you read carefully, it said (and I believe it's true) that the datasheet will not sell the product. Also true, it will actually be more likely to lose customers because some detail doesn't match the customer's goals. For products above $100K, having a sales person who can actually listen to what the customer wants, and tailor their pitch appropriately, is worth millions. No "useless, overpaid sales staff". Of course, your mileage varies greatly in sales :-)

westicle 15y ago
I would have thought a customer not purchasing the product because it doesn't meet their requirements (or some part of their requirements) is a net win. If the OP was correct that his technical specifications were exhaustive and accurate, a prospective purchaser would be in a good position to make the purchasing decision. Are we now encouraging sales through obfuscation and sales-person trickery?

jleader 15y ago

"A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers". This is wrong in several ways: A few years later, Convergent was bought by Unisys for $350 million (in 1988 dollars). http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unisys-says-it-will-buy-convergent.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unis... The MegaFrame wasn't competing with personal computers, it was competing with engineering workstations (Sun, Apollo, etc.) and departmental minicomputers (HP, DG, others I don't recall at the moment). Convergent's personal computer products were arguably less crappy than IBM's (they often were a generation ahead in CPUs (80186 vs 8088, then 386 vs 286, etc.), they ran a multitasking message-passing OS instead of DOS, etc.). For a while, they sold quite well in some markets (e.g. every U-Haul office in the country had a B-25 on every desk at one point in the early 90s). They lost anyway, because cheap crappy PC clones were so ubiquitous, and the resulting software and hardware ecosystem could out-evolve any specialized product from a single company.

kragen 15y ago

The market segment was still alive and well as of 2000, bigger than ever, and technically you can still buy SPARCs and POWER workstations.