On 5/7/08, Andrei Herasimchuk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
Completely agree with you here. Infact the training and maintanence are also part of the design only because that is actually a need for an enterprise customer. As I said you try and sell them a product without either and they wont take it even if the tool itself is easy to use because it doesnt fullfil all their goals. Training helps get all the users in the company at the same playing field and they can communicate easily. Since the only documentation is user guides its not in the interest of the enterprise customers to make their employees read and learn taking days together and each will learn a different part and hence may not speak the same language. A 2-7 day training works better and cheaper :-). They also need maintanence because the dollars paid there ensures a time gaurantee of when a patch will be delivered and how the new releases will come by. Without that they may not be able to dictate an early patch release if their businesses are waiting for it. So now that there is a user goal, we design to it. We spend extra time and dollars making sure we have good training and maintanence support but the design and interactions of the product itself are not the focus area, functionalilty is. It may come as a surprise but the total size of our training and support teams is equal if not larger than the total engineering teams. > 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. Well I agree here also but then it has to be within the context of how many more customers are available and whether you are in the consumer space or the enterprise space. The problem in enterprise space is that the actual user (the real engineer) is not the decision maker and however loyal he might be the final decision (infact engineer is generally not part of the decision making also) is made by the enterprise business teams and for them there are more important things that loyalty of their employees for a particular tool. It works for Apple because it works in the consumer space and there brand loyalty and word of mouth is the king. How many enterprises have you seen that use a Mac instead of a far far crappier Dell. Most enterprises use Dell/Lenovo because they can (almost) gaurantee maintanence support anywhere in the world (to enterprise customers, and maintanence support is an important enterprise goal) . Apple cannot gaurantee that and neither does it care because of its consumer base. > 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. We dont design crappy product by design, we just focus less on design and more on functionality (read features) and more on the training and maintanence needs because that is an important enterprise goal. As I said customers do have a choice to move to the easier-to-use mainstream products but they dont because ease-of-use is a lesser goal than supportability for them. 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
