Why do we need marketers in standard bodies?
April 5, 2007
By Kfir Pravda
Ok, I am a marketer. I have engineering background, but I am certainly on the “let’s find the story” side than the “where to plug this router” side. And I can tell you, I think that standardization process needs more marketers around.
So now you ask yourself why, right?
The answer is simple – the current process takes too much time. As such, it makes standards irrelevant from business perspective. We are talking about SIP for ages. Skype has bigger market share. Why? Cause engineers and marketers set together and solved problems based on specific use cases. So, engineers should be happy to have marketers around – not for advice, but in order to sort out all the different issues on the table between companies.
Standards suppose to support services and products. Therefore, they are supposed to be based on some kind of requirements. These requirements should be, in my opinion, based on market needs. And market needs are represented by marketers, not by engineering functions.
So why in most standardization organizations we have almost no representation? Even IMTC, the organization publishing this blog have only one marketer on board (yours truly).
What is your opinion?
Are Open Standards helpful and beneficial?
March 20, 2007
Open standards play a vital role in today’s communications. Traditional PSTN telephony, which is still empowering most of the world to communicate, wired and wireless IP networks, Internet, World Wide Web – all of this technologies we are so used to are based on Open Standards.
At the same time, open standards have their own “dark” side. They require heavy investment of time and money to develop – top notch experts from all over the world spend lots of time working on the standards. Once developed, implementation and deployment are also costly, as interoperability needs to be tested and verified. Additionally, the need to “play by the [open standard] rules” might adversely impact time to market.
A lot of today’s success stories, as Skype, for instance, are closed end systems. You don’t spend lots of time trying to reach consensus in ego and politics fight, you deploy when you ready, you control who connects to your network, you change implementation as you see fit – and this list of advantages can be easily continued.
So in the end of the day, are Open Standards helpful and beneficial or not? Do they push technology forward or become a stumbling block? IMTC (International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium), together with PulverMedia, assembled panel of experts who will help us to find answers to some of these questions.
To Standard or not to Standard
March 1, 2007
By Kfir Pravda
So you gathered a bunch of telecom freaks, rented a basement, and saved some budget for cold Pizza. You are going to conquer the world with your amazing application that changes the way people consume media and communicate – forever. Chambers is going to beg you for a job, and the guys with the funny name from Estonia will have wished they stayed in P2P file sharing applications when you’re done.
Now is the time to get down and dirty with the little details – such as – are you trying to build a whole new ecosystem, or ride on the waves of others?
More specifically – are you going to create your own proprietary protocols, or base your product on open standards?
One of the biggest mistakes is to think that this is a technical question that an engineer should answer. The truth is that this question is mainly a business and strategic one. It pretty much depends on the way you see your future – do you want to be an ant in the grass, with a chance to become the next big thing that captures the market? Or would you rather ride on the back of the elephant, with a chance to play a major part in an industry created by others (with deeper pockets)?
I have to say that there are a lot of pros in going standard. First of all, you can reduce your development time by using the accumulated knowledge of the industry. The knowledge you can tap when working in a standard environment will always exceed any amount of engineers and technology experts you can possibly hire.
Second, in case your application is based on a Network Effect, like most of the communication products, you can rely on the marketing dollars of others to educate the market. Then, you just need to find a niche where you gain cash and exposure (in a way, the “crossing the chasm” concept).
Third, you might be able to shorten the time to exit. If you base your products on standards, a company which is interested in buying you will have a much easier life in integrating your products in their organization and product line (based on the assumption it also works on standard based products).
Well, this would have been a great post if those annoying guys from Skype didn’t come with their amazing application. You see – they did it all on their own, and at the end of the day – made my mother use VoIP – before any other SIP based product. They focused on user experience, and still managed to beat the rest of the VoIP techies to the desktop.
If so, maybe the standard world isn’t that great? First, it takes ages to draft standards. Then, the standard bodies are dominated by the big players, which make the life of the little guys harder – as they have different agendas then helping a young start-up to rise. And last but not least, it is not trivial to find a niche in a standard based industry, especially for a small company. When standards reduce technical competitive advantage, marketing dollars kicks in – an area in which a small company will usually loose to the big guys.
So, here is the question: If you would develop a new video conferencing application, the next VoIP system, or any other communication related product – what will be your choice? To Standard or Not To Standard?
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We are going to try and answer this question at the panel “My Mother uses Skype – Why Bother with Standards?” in the upcoming Spring VON, in San Jose, 19-22nd of March 2007. Among the panelists are Anatoli Levine, IMTC president and Sr. Director, Software Support at RADVISION, Håkon Dahle, CTO, TANDBERG, Chris Steck, Director of Technology Strategy, RealNetworks, and the brave Skype representative Jonathan Christensen.
This post by Kfir Pravda was originally published in Jeff Pulver’s blog
