Congratulations to Jim Cahill and Emerson Process Experts on a year online. And you're only 200,000 ahead of me in links-to on Technorati. You're doing a good job, keep it up.
But Jim has a new competitor in the corporate blogging fray -- Siemens Energy & Automation. This one has just started, but the first posts look a lot like Jim's--good expert advice with minimum company promotion (even I think that some company mention is ok, believe it or not ;-) I've now added this one to my feed reader. Hope Charlie and the others can keep this one going. Interestingly, one of Charlie Fialkowski's first posts had to do with wanting to present at the ISA conference and was rejected because he's with a supplier. I posted a reply there, but this is a continuation of my posts about speakers at the ARC Forum. In the latter case, if just one CEO descends into a sales pitch, paying conference goers feel cheated. Same thing at the ISA conference. I know Charlie and he's darn smart and knowledgeable about safety. But if just one supplier turned the conference presentation into a company promotion piece, then the paying customers feel cheated. This may be called "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" but I don't make the rules.
Bob Gill, an excellent editor from Singapore, asks what the big deal is on the nodes versus revenue debate on industrial networks. If I had thought things through, I'd have pointed out that the real news is that use of fieldbuses is growing and probably reaching a critical mass in the market. But if I were in business, I'd rather have revenue, all things considered ;-)
I was thinking that when I whipped off a short post about the ProSoft Technology / Elpro spec war, it may have sounded a little harsh on Nick over at ProSoft. He just needs to remind his engineers to be careful of comparing to competition. At least three different times in my career, I've had the dubious pleasure of being the product development person sent to talk to the sales force about the features of our products versus theirs. I learned a number of things about comparisons after living with the results. Then I was a customer. Then I was in sales. At that time, the Texas Instruments PLC was being discontinued by its new owners which gave me an opening to sell my PLC to an engineer at a chemical plant. After the "Ti-way is xxx fast, and your data highway is (xxx)-(xx) fast" opening, I got the conversation over to whether my data highway was fast enough for his application, made the sale and made a friend. One final example--several years ago (a fieldbus organization) posted a comparison of its network versus a competitor's on its Website. You'll be shocked to learn that it favored theirs. That would be OK, except that whoever did the comparison didn't thoroughly research the competition. They took the page down pretty quickly. So for lots of reasons, I like it when people promote their own features/benefits and keep the competitive stuff to a minimum. Didn't mean any harm, just a reaction.
I've been studying leadership and team building for most of my life. After yesterday's post about team building, got a call from Dave Holmes at Emerson with some ideas. Anyone else have some? gmintchell@automationworld.com or 937.726.1798.
3:54:12 PM 
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