HP toyed with getting out of the PC business (and, interestingly, pulled the plug on its own foray into tablets, effectively throwing in the towel on its $1.2 billion bet on Palm) to focus on higher-end business hardware, software, and services. Other major PC manufacturers struggle to achieve low single-digit growth which barely keeps up with growth in the overall population and economy. It’s certainly tempting to see a sea-change in the world similar to that which ushered in PCs in the first place.

But as tempting as that viewpoint may be, I subscribe to the slightly less radical view that the PC isn’t going away anytime soon. Just as TV didn’t displace the radio, and the Internet didn’t displace TV, I see this new generation of device complementing and enhancing, but not doing away with, the workhorse that is the PC. Certainly the market for PCs may shrink a bit as some consumers decide they can do their email, access Facebook, and browse the web as easily from their iPads, but even more are likely to continue to value the usability, functional keyboard, and large screen provided by their PC and will use it for their “fixed time” connectivity activities, while using mobile devices for around the house and around town activities. Similarly, in the enterprise I see PCs continuing to be the main way to access key applications and data from the primary work area, while mobile devices provide a supplemental way for employees to be productive when away from their desk.

Mark Twain was reputed to love science and technology, having applied for many patents and befriending scientists and inventors. I’m sure he would have loved the technology in our current world, and would have been a strong appreciator of smart mobile devices, but I would guess he would agree that it is a bit too early to write the obituary for our old friend the PC.

Like much of the rest of the business technology world, I took particular note when I heard yesterday’s announcement that Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO at Apple. Like many technology consumers, I am an admitted Apple fan, having made the switch to the iPhone from my BlackBerry several years ago and having stood in line for the original iPad 3G version the day it went on sale. My roots go all the way back to college days when I typed my papers on a shiny new Macintosh computer.

So a number of thoughts struck me when I heard the news, but the one that really stuck was the comparison to the departure of Eddie DeBartolo Jr., former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, during the 1990s. Like Apple, the 49ers had built a legacy of success and innovation. They had enjoyed nearly two decades of unrivaled excellence on the field, fuelled in no small part by a culture of success and by innovations in offensive strategy, scouting, and player/personnel management.

It all started from the top. DeBartolo put in place a world-class front office management team that hired the most brilliant coaching minds in the game and assembled one of the most talented sets of players ever. DeBartolo set the tone of the organization as well, with a win-at-all-costs mentality and spare no expense approach to creating the finest organization the game had ever seen. The results were impressive, with the 49ers winning 5 super bowls in less than 20 years, and showcasing the careers of multiple hall of fame players.

Unfortunately (for us 49er fans), it all began to unravel when DeBartolo was indicted on gambling charges in Louisiana and had to give the team to his sister and her husband, Denise and John York. Of course, nothing much changed overnight, as the solid management team, coaching staff, and all-star roster continued to practice excellence, even dominance, in the league. But little by little Camelot was chipped away. Carmen Policy, the team President, left for Cleveland and his position was redefined. Coaches left and were replaced by less capable football minds. Draft picks were wasted and the best players went to other teams. The drive for success and culture of innovation and commitment to excellence was gone, and a culture of mediocrity seeped in, little by little.

Of course, that’s my worry for Apple. I realize Jobs has put in place a world-class team and that many of the brilliant minds behind the innovative products and tenacious, even ruthless, business practices are still there, with executives like new CEO Tim Cook. But without Jobs I doubt Apple will be able to retain the magic, the certain indefinable characteristic, that unified the company behind a single vision and enabled it to pursue that vision relentlessly to perfection. Like the 49ers, I don’t doubt that Apple will stay at the top of its game for several years yet at least, but little by little I expect it to fall back to Earth. And when that happens I think we’ll all be little poorer.

So what’s a marketer to do? I’ve given a lot of thought to best practices in pricing over the years, and I’ve developed a concept I refer to as “Utility Pricing”. Simply put, Utility Pricing consists of understanding the economic value your product or service provides to your customer and how that value scales (i.e. how it grows as the size of your sale grows), and pricing your product to take a “reasonable” percentage of that value. That way your customer can build a very clear ROI value proposition for using your offering, and at the same time, you can scale your revenue to extract the maximum reasonable value out of each customer engagement, be it large or small.

Of course, you must take factors such as business case objectives (what market opportunities and business goals do you have) and competitive positioning (are you a premium-positioned offering or a low-price leader) into account as well. You must also consider things like discounting, auditing and measurement, and the inevitable downward pressure of pricing in today’s competitive marketplace.

I have put together a slide presentation describing some of these thoughts, complete with visual and numerical examples, and listing out objectives, pricing frameworks, and key success factors to apply Utility Pricing. It introduces a handy acronym, “BEST”, to ensure you have captured the key elements of the methodology. Like everything else in my Document Library, it’s available for download without cost or obligation, as a service to those in my professional network. Please feel free to peruse it, and all I ask in return is you think of me next time you need to price (or position, communicate, or otherwise enable) your products or services in the marketplace.

Unfortunately all too often too many of us simply plunge in and start asking questions (or designing surveys) without spending as much time as we should thinking about how the information is going to be used, or even what the questions really are. Instead, we can take a page from our physicist and biologist friends and apply a little bit of the scientific method. Specifically I am talking about forming and testing hypotheses to guide our research.

In case you started zoning out during that last sentence all I really mean is taking an educated guess at what we think we are going to find at the end of the research. The hypotheses (or educated guesses) should be based on the best of your current knowledge, and should frame up the areas of inquiry you want to dig into.

For example, let’s say you are designing a customer satisfaction survey, and you believe that your customers are generally happy but there are one or two areas in which you believe your customer experience is lacking, let’s say in product reliability and service/support. You could form hypotheses along the lines of “while we are doing fairly well our lack of product reliability is causing a great deal of customer churn,” “customers don’t place much value on service/support so lack of performance there is not a problem,” or “the customers who are unhappiest with our service/support are our least profitable customers anyway so it makes sense for not to invest too heavily in it.”

Each of these hypotheses will lead to different aspects to dig into in the research and different questions to answer. For example, the first hypothesis connects customer satisfaction with certain service components to customer churn and will cause you to think about things like interviewing customers who recently left and understanding the reasons for their defection. The third hypothesis on the other hand may lead you to link the results of your research with information from your customer database to correlate the satisfaction findings with customer profitability metrics.

Applying this approach is likely to inform your research methodology and questions to be addressed. The results are likely to be more valuable to your organization, and more likely to touch upon critical business issues you need to resolve.

Your hypotheses don’t have to be complicated, or even terribly “unusual” or “insightful”. The key is that it forces you to think about critical business and marketing issues and how your research will be applied to answering them. And by doing it up front, you can construct your research to ensure it addresses the questions you really need answers to, so you don’t get stuck with the “oh, I wish I had asked that” syndrome quite so often.

First, a bit about what I mean by “game mechanics.” Quite simply, game mechanics refers to the elements of (computer-based) gameplay that makes games fun (and addictive). Different authorities list them slightly differently, but broadly speaking, they include things like the ability to compete with others to get the best “score”, the ability to earn achievements or awards, the ability to collect items, frequent and regular feedback, and some others.

All, some, or most of these mechanics are found in games like Angry Birds or World of Warcraft, and whether through conscious design or just because they have an intuitive understanding of how to make good games, most game designers incorporate them as a matter of course. But in my experience, most marketers in other sectors of the tech industry and outside the tech industry don’t do much of it at all outside of things like “look under your bottle cap to win” promos and the like.

It can be as simple as repackaging your products so when the customer purchases each of them they “complete the set” and get some sort of achievement recognition for doing so. Or if you have a service, providing regular feedback to customers as to how they are doing, especially relative to their peers, can help build engagement. Turn retention into a game with rewards, milestones, and transparency into how customers are doing and you may see a big increase in stickiness.

This isn’t all theoretical. FourSquare and Gowalla, two of the current darlings of the location based services industry, are using game mechanics in a clever way to get their customers to build a rich and potentially very valuable geolocation-aware database of businesses.

It doesn’t necessarily require vast new marketing investments. What it does mean is introducing new ways to interact with your customers. Bringing a little more game play into your customer relationships can go a long way.

Then, when Windows 95 came out it embedded fax capabilities directly on the desktop, and within a few years Delrina and its competitors were pretty much completely wiped off the face of the map (Symantec purchased Delrina, sold off various products and the founders scattered). This was a classic example of the platform expanding to destroy the market for a particular class of application, and there are countless other examples of this phenomenon in the annals of computing history.

Watching the tussle between these two tech giants makes me wonder if we’re about to see the same thing happen yet again. Don’t get me wrong, I actually have a soft spot in my heart for Adobe and its Creative Suite, having project work to support one of the early launches of Creative Suite, and I have tremendous respect for its ability to fend off larger competitors and continue to release best in class products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and, yes, Flash.
But with HTML 5, things are likely to get more interesting. In the draft stages at the standards bodies that govern HTML, it is being championed by the likes of Apple and Google. It is likely to roll out in the next couple of years, with certain components likely to be supported by a number of websites even sooner. And the key is, HTML 5 supports standards for embedded video, obviating the need for an add-in like Flash. While this will all still need to be worked out, and in fact there are still competing standards vying for the ultimate HTML 5 video codec crown, the point is that sooner or later a video standard will become part of generic old HTML, and the platform will have grown to engulf the market for video players in HTML.

So what’s a company like Adobe to do? Fortunately (at least compared to the Delrina example), it has several other revenue-producing flagship products it can fall back on. But when it comes to video players, that’s a tougher nut to crack. One approach would be to become compatible with the evolving standard, but to evolve into an add-on that offers additional features and benefits that HTML 5 does not (improved image quality, ability to work over limited bandwidth connections/interoperability with mobile devices, “push” feature to drive content such as sports scores, ability to download content in the background while the user is working on something else, etc). But however Adobe decides to approach it, it would be wise to observe the lessons from history.

What Scout Labs does is track mentions in the social media space (blogs, forums, Twitter, news, other commentary) and allows you to not only search against any keyword under the sun, but then to keep a running tally of those results so you can track the number of mentions of the terms you are interested in over time.  They even track “positive” versus “negative” mentions so you can see if people are blogging/Tweeting positively about the item care about or not.

The way I find myself using it for the most part is for the search capability.  If I need to learn more about, say, “social media”, I can simply enter the terms (including terms that are mandatory, optional, and prohibited) and it comes back to me with a list of blogs, forum entries, and Tweets that are relevant to the search in question. I have found this to be much more valuable than Google searches for many of the things I do, because bloggers are often writing informed opinions about the topic in question while Google results can be anything under the sun. By having it so concentrated in one spot I get an incredibly quick crash-course on the subject and am much more efficient than just using Google.

I also use the tracking service a bit, and while it’s less relevant for me personally I can see how it would be incredibly valuable to most of my clients. You can put your product or brand name in a search, say “iPad” for example, and you can track not only the number of times people blog/tweet/etc about the term “iPad”, but what percent of them are positive mentions and what percent are negative.  And you can see how this has changed over the past six months.

So it’s been a fun thing for me to play around with, and has allowed me to learn a lot.  More important, I’ve found it to be an invaluable business tool for technology marketing professionals.

This is a top-of-mind topic at the moment as I’m just wrapping up a project for a client in which an associate and I interviewed over a dozen customers to gauge their reaction to proposed messaging and positioning statements leading up to the launch of a new version of one of their major products.

It seems like a “duh” moment for me to be writing this, but I was struck as my associate and I were doing the final analysis and presenting the findings to the client, as to how important and fundamental this exercise is/was, yet how infrequently done. The feedback was invaluable, and while the client’s messaging was 85% on track, the 15% adjustments that were made could make a major difference in how well the messaging (and the product) is received in the marketplace. These conversations with customers helped the company realize its proposed product naming was off track and now they are now going in an entirely different direction from the one they had been pursuing before we conducted the interviews.

Having run marketing organizations for close to a dozen tech companies large and small (both as a full-time employee and on an interim basis as a consultant), and having seen dozens more over the ten years I’ve been doing consulting, I know for a fact that talking to customers is an exception rather than the rule when tech companies are making key decisions, launching new products, or adjusting their messaging. And yet the insights you gain, from simple, basic adjustments to word choice, all the way to revamping your core product strategy, can be profoundly important.

And it doesn’t take much time or effort. You can certainly do it yourself if you are so inclined. Split up your customer list and assign a few to each executive and marketing manager in your company. Or, it if’s too difficult to set aside the time, you can always outsource the task to a trusted consultant (requisite self-serving plug for my own business). For more advanced practitioners, setting up a customer advisory council that you tap into frequently can yield a wealth of input.

Finally, there are benefits beyond simply what you learn from your customers. Actively engaging and listenting to them can be a contributing factor to turning them into strong advocates for your company and product. And with so much clutter and confusion in many technology markets today, having strong customer references and positive word of mouth can go a long way, especially for earlier-stage startups.

So to borrow from Nike: just do it. Go out and talk to your customers. Do customer satisfaction surveys, win-loss analyses, and tests for proposed product strategies and messaging statements. The insights you gain will be invaluable.

I’m calling this blog “The Point” and it will have somewhat more in-depth treatment of occasional topics that I hope to be of interest to technology marketers, and my Twitter feed will consist both of exerpts and pointers to this blog, as well as occasional notes and thoughts that can fit into 140 characters and don’t require a full blog post.

How often should you check back here? Well, if you follow me on Twitter you can refer back any time you see something interesting. Otherwise I’m planning/hoping to update content here every few weeks or once a month at the latest. If you find my occasional posts to my Document Library of interest or value, hopefully you’ll feel the same way about the blog.

I’m not sure what the impact on the Document Library will be. We will just have to see how it goes. If it feels completely redundant I may stop uploading there entirely. On the other hand, I may end up putting white papers or other deeper-level content there and summarizing it here. Time will tell.

So why the title “The Point?” Well, I like the multiple meanings, all of which seem to be, yes, on point. There’s the obvious one: getting to the point. I hope to keep it pithy, focused, and pertinent to what I believe technology marketers would want to know. It’s also an allusion to marketing being “the pointy end of the spear”, where marketers need to identify customers’ needs and develop ways to satisfy those needs. Based on what those definitions are, other groups like engineering, sales, and business development create their operational plans and follow the path blazed by marketing. Or at least that’s the way it should work. Yes, Google turns up other blogs with that name but I don’t actually expect to come up with something that no on anywhere has used before (and is still part of the English language).

So thanks for reading my inaugural post and please feel free to provide any feedback, thoughts, or questions and I’ll try to respond as quickly as I can.

Ed