Internet has revolutionized the marketing of software products
A recurring theme in this blog is that the Internet has transformed the marketing of technology products and in no industry has been so evident as in the software business. The software is a product unique for several reasons:
- Costs are dominated by the first unit, with marginal costs that can be negligible, even if they customize the product.
- Facility for collaborative development, including teams from loosely coupled, and that has led to the open source phenomenon.
- In many categories of software phenomena commoditization and availability of free products that make the users are less willing to pay for it.
- High product complexity, which makes it difficult to learn, use and communicate their benefits and that may impose barriers to the adoption and change.
Who has taken my IT buyer?
The marketing of IT products is undergoing a radical change. At a time like the present one in which business executives expect that technology is increasingly critical to its success and IT managers consume most of their efforts on maintaining systems with more than 30 years old, it is normal makers involved with business and even a "bridge" to his fellow-time systems to incorporate new technologies to improve their processes, or give them advantages over their competitors. And that means that marketing must take into account this shift in influence buying.
Technology markets and positive feedback
We all agree that the markets for technology products are often characterized by instability, unpredictability of its evolution, the ability of competitors to block market access, the ability to dominate the end product and lower profits for the generous the winner. And much of this behavior is due to the effects of positive feedback that occurs between actors in these markets and the economists known as increasing returns on the demand side. This positive feedback is responsible for a product that is beginning to evolve to succeed sole better (and that one with a bad position tends to worsen their situation) and is the cause of market movement, for example, to a certain operating system or a DVD made from among several competitors.
Open to innovation
For a long time, innovation has been an activity internal to the organization and developed as a series of steps carefully managed. This vision in which a company creates, develops and commercializes its own ideas and innovation that can be called "vertically integrated" or "closed" has been called into question during the last decade by more open approach to innovation.
Probably most who have written about the concept of "open innovation" and its implications for the business is Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the University of Berkeley and also directs the Center for Open Innovation at the university. "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology" Chesbrough describes open innovation as an approach in which the company markets both its own ideas and innovations generated in other organizations and seeking ways to bring these ideas to the market using channels may be outside your current business (e.g., licensing and spin-offs). With this philosophy, the boundary between an enterprise and its environment is more permeable to the flow of innovations between the two.