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Technology Marketing 101: What to say when the software engineers miss the launch date?


Purchase now, upgrade later!

By James E. Bagley, senior analyst
Storage strategies NOW

Software-based features usually don’t match general availability of the hardware that runs them. The reason is quite simple. In most cases, final software testing can’t happen until the hardware is completely revved up. And the most advanced features often need those final tweaks at the hardware level for proofing. When faced with delaying an entire product introduction (often heavily pre-hyped) versus releasing the hardware and promising a free or low-cost upgrade on the advanced software feature, many organizations will opt for the latter, however fraught with peril.

Peril comes from two sides. The first side is the automatic overhang of the hardware revenue. Customers can often defer the hardware investment until all of the software features are available, reducing their risk and near term capital outlays. The second side of the peril is if, in the final round of testing, some kind of hardware non-starter is discovered that requires a hardware replacement to make that software feature work. Man, I’ve been there before.

Even if the best plans work out, software upgrades are not free, even if there is no cost from the vendor. Doing brain surgery on modern equipment has its own set of risks. Minimally, the product needs to be taken out of service at some point in the process. Maximally, an engineer needs to walk through a tedious process that can produce disaster by a single error while the data center manager sweats and fumes.

As hardware manufacturers increasingly rely on sophistication in operating software for product differentiation, this dilemma will haunt more and more product developers and marketers. The worst cases are when the feature delay has not been planned into the launch cycle, causing the product marketing team to invent ‘benefits,’ often associated with reduced margins, for a buy the hardware now and add the software features at a later date. Since this is a fact of life, and most companies will opt for near term hardware revenue and market share, this modern equivalent of ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ is likely to be the norm.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 5:34 am and is filed under Bagley's bITes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. // Both Comments and Pings are open ?> You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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