Friday, November 3, 2006

Automation Minutes podcast posted Episode 21, Automation Fair, is up. 7:22:19 PM    comment []

Positive Marketing Thinking about my previous post on marketing based on your strengths rather than marketing based on making the competitor look bad -- I just received a care package from Carl Henning, Profibus/Profinet evangelist and blogger. He couldn't make it to Pack Expo but sent a couple of copies of a new Profinet brochure ("The Story of Pretty Polly, Sweet Sue and the White Knight"). This is an excellent example of what I was saying. It tells the story of Profinet in straightforward terms without stooping to bash the competitors. I'm sure if you ping him, he'll tell you how to get your hands on one. Another example is the Emerson press conference announcing its wireless products and strategy. No mention of others, just what we have and why you should care. That's more powerful than any other way. 2:45:55 PM    comment []

Wireless market Jim Pinto's latest e-news is out and he's covering a lot of wireless. He even quoted me with a nice, but probably undeserved compliment. He made a statement about the standards process that I've been pondering all morning. "My personal opinion is that committees are dominated by suppliers with their own agendas, and confused end-users. By the time ANY standard is announced, it is already outdated by new technology enhancements." On the surface, that makes sense. But let's drill down a little. Who else is going to work on a technical committee like this than engineers that work for technology suppliers? Few end user engineers have the time to take a deep dive into the technology--even if that is their expertise. Typical end user engineers are devoting their time, talent and energy to improving the processes that are their company's core competency. They look to their technology providers for needed expertise when it comes to technologies they need to implement their ideas. For example, I heard several times from OEMs at Rockwell's Automation Fair that they look at their supplier as part of their R&D department. So, if the committee is dominated by technology suppliers and academics (the others with time to think about new technology), that's not necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is what is communicated to the user community. I have been privately (and now only semi-privately) preaching to every marketing person in the industry the importance of communicating the benefits of their particular solution--and NOT getting into a "my protocol is better than their protocol" kind of argument. If they promote the reliability and benefits of their solution, it will encourage users to try out new technologies. If they get into what are essentially internal bickering and arguing, it will just confuse the market. As an example I offer the late, great PC-based control technology. In the 90s, there was a huge amount of conversation about this new technology. But too often executives got into a "my real-time kernel is better than your real-time kernel" argument. Customers got confused, so they quite naturally retreated into technologies they knew. Guess what? Many of those PC-based companies have disappeared with only some of the technologies surviving within other solutions. Some of the companies survived and have morphed the conversation into more pragmatic directions (see Opto 22 and its market conversations about programmable automation controllers for example). Much of the technology also found its way into the platforms of the hated enemy--PLCs. To me, it's the same in wireless. If the technology providers can focus on what's important rather than internal fighting, we all win. Now, if only politicians could concentrate on communicating benefits rather than calling each other names -- nah, let's just hope we can have rational discussions around automation. Jim can deal with the political landscape ;-) 11:28:54 AM    comment []

Interoperability Interoperability -- that's a term heard often in automation. Now, it's a big word in the high-tech industry--especially if you're running server farms. Microsoft and Novell announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support to make it easier to run both Windows and Suse Linux. Key to the agreement is an agreement to provide each other's customers with patent coverage for their respective products. Steve Ballmer stated during the press conference (that I caught live over the Web) that the key words were interoperability, flexibility for customers, and better management of the Windows/Linux combination on a computer. I picked up this link from Robert Scoble who points to Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems for an outside view. Yahoo News has several reports. 6:56:11 AM    comment []