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> Harvard MBA Types Steve Jobs: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product
by ortusdux 3y ago
> Harvard MBA Types
Steve Jobs:
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
- LaundroMat 3y agoThat last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.
- slt2021 3y agonowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living" - to increase audience size/TAM to maximum)
- CharlesW 3y ago> nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. Like "Engineering", "Marketing" encompasses a bunch of roles — growth marketing is generally handled by one person or team, messaging by another person or team, etc., all hopefully working in concert toward common goals under the CMO. (Good) Product Marketing folks have extremely close relationships with the teams who are architecting and building the product, and care very much about the kind of craftsmanship Steve was talking about.
- alephnerd 3y agoProduct Marketing continues to exist, especially in the B2B space. That said, the function has increasingly merged with Product Management because GTM is critical to Product Strategy. In the B2C space, it's hard to drive product lead growth simply because the economics are much more difficult (eg. Selling a product vision to an enterprise who will sign a multi-year contract is easier than changing the mind of millions of consumers). As such, it's much more cost efficient to concentrate on Growth Marketing because product input and stakeholdership is simply too diffused.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klabb3 3y agoStory of our time. Contrary to popular belief, market capitalism isn’t inherently good. It needs competition for the magic to work, ideally a lot of it. Otherwise you get Comcast.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoBut ActiBlizz doesn't have any monopolies ? (Unlike, say, Steam, or Microsoft.) If their games are bad, quickly enough nobody will buy them any more (regardless of how much they invested in marketing).
- zanellato19 3y agoIP goes such a long way, though. To overtake ActiBlizz on MMO's, for example, you would have to build something 10x better than WoW. And any Diablo game is going to sell a shit ton, even if it isn't good.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoThere's no need to overtake, for instance Eve Online can exist in parallel with WoW.