And suddenly reality sneaks in and rears it's ugly head.... Good design is usually a good thing, but it always has to be balanced with the business and marketing plans. It can never stand alone in isolation and expect to be effective just on its own merits.
-Peter From: "Pankaj Chawla" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Jared M. Spool" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: IXDA list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 05/07/2008 05:05 AM Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] the UX hall of shame On 5/7/08, Jared M. Spool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On May 6, 2008, at 12:15 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote: > > When I started there, I was told, unofficially, that they never wanted > > their > > products to be too good, because then no one would call in to customer > > support. And customer support is where all the up-sells happen. You call > > about a problem or to set something up and end up spending more money on > > other products related to what you need to do. This is how GD operates. > > This > > is why their site is so tragically bad and there is no apparent desire > > to > > improve it. > > > > Shhh! Don't tell Andrei! You'll rock his world! > > :) > > Jared Thats precisely the reason why I didnt pitch in into the last thread otherwise I have exactly the story. Anyways here goes. We and almost all our competitors have cases of exactly similar products one for the enterprise market and one for the mainstream market with the only visible difference being ease-of-use. The enterprise editions are difficult to use and hence bring in a lot of dollars via training, deployment and maintanence whereas the mainstream ones only bring in licensing revenues. If you ask the mainstream customers for any of those additionals things they will walk away but enterprise customers feel that a product without attached training and stuff is incomplete product. The funny thing is that the enterprise edition sells for 5 times the price of the mainstream ones but since the market size is also 1:10, both eventually bring in similar dollars to the bottomline. Think what would happen if enterprise also went without the training and maintanence dollars, it would actually be adding 50% less dollars and that will make no business sense which ever way you look at it. Cheers Pankaj ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
