On May 7, 2008, at 2:05 AM, Pankaj Chawla wrote:
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.
Once again: Simplicity is not the goal. Designing a product to be only
as complex as it needs to be is always the goal. Ease of use is a
relative term that has to match a specific criteria and a specific
audience. E.g., UNIX Is easy to use to those for which it was designed.
When you design things properly, training, upsells and all the extra
business revenue doesn't magically disappear. In fact, it can easily
increase because a well designed products build massive brand loyalty
in customers. Massive brand loyalty is the king of all business models
and with it, comes the ability to make even more money.
For God's sake... look at Apple. They now promote training and Smart
Bars at the Apple Store. I thought the Mac OS was supposed to be easy
to use? Business models that rely on training, education and all that
have absolutely NOTHING to do with making sure the product is designed
as craptastic as possible. And the biggest mistake any designer can
make is to fall into the trap of thinking that crappy, intentionally
hard to use design approaches is somehow the reason products sell.
It's not. Never has been.
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Principal, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
c. +1 408 306 6422
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