Walter,
I found your post really interesting. More so because I come from the
same place as Sage - Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. I had no idea they were
making such an impact in North Carolina. Thanks for taking the trouble
to let us know.
I don't know about the differences between men and women, but I do know
quite a lot about how Sage was founded and how it developed.
I think I've already mentioned some of this in a previous post, but it
might be worth going into a little more depth here.
My Dad sold printing machines. One of his customers was a small printing
company in Newcastle called Campbell Graphics, run by a guy called David
Goldman. Throughout the early eighties, Dad passed on a string of tales
about how Goldman had hired this student from Newcastle University who
was develop an accounting package for the new microcomputers in his
spare time. I had been working mainframes so thought microcomputers were
nothing more than toys and developing software for them nothing more
than a joke. My Dad didn't agree. But he was just a common-or-garden
printer who had left school at 15. What did he know? Well, as it turned
out, quite a lot more than me actually. How many times have I kicked
myself since for not listening to him?
For the first couple of years I was proved right. They sold less than a
hundred! But the tipping point turned out to be the launch of the
Amstrad PCW. I thought that was an even bigger joke. Whilst Intel are
releasing the 80286 and Microsoft are releasing DOS, Amstrad launches
machines running obsolete 8-bit Z80s running CP/M? Do me a favour! But
Goldman didn't think so. He adapted Sage to run on CP/M and watched
sales leap to 300 month!
For the full Goldman story see
http://www.davidgoldman-sage.com/Entrepenuer_Resume.htm
And the moral of the tale (apart from the perils of not listening to
your father's advice?
Well, a couple of quotes from the Goldman story stand out:
Even in these early days he was driven by customer needs. “The
Customer is King” was the title of a large and colourful poster of
a Lion behind his desk.
From the outset the emphasis of the company was on marketing - being
driven by the needs of the customer rather than the technology. In
fact David said, “Sage is a marketing company that happens to sell
software.” Branding was everything to the fledgling company, and
everything was done in order to create and then strengthen the Sage
brand. This approach allowed Sagesoft, as it was by this stage, to
achieve market dominance, overtaking their competitors, all of whom
already had products selling in the market place.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my Dad used to say :)
Ian
Walter Vaughan wrote:
Over the past year I have read about the lack of PR around ofBiz, and
getting pointy haired bosses to accept something as wild as ofBiz as
"best of breed" rather than "well this is cheaper, so lets do this".
Today in my mail with about 5 or 6 magazines, was a copy of a magazine
called "businessminds"... "Smart Ideas to help run your business".
This thing is a true work of art.
The cover had a glued on outside front page with an engaging picture
of a cute 20-30 something woman on her way to her corner office, and
the bottom half had a offer to win a free Dell laptop. The real cover
has a pair of conductor hands with a lead article entitled "On Being a
LEADER", and other teasers as if it was just magazine like Baseline,
CIO...
Inside front cover is a two page spread from GM leasing. Page 5 has ad
for a Chevy Pickkup, page 7 has ad from CDW and McAfee, page 9 has
PitneyBowes selling a small business meter with a 60 day free trial
and $50 postage, oddly on page 13 PitneyBowes thinks that I should buy
my toner cartridges from them. Packet8 had a two page spread on page
18 and 19 on their hosted VOIP solution, and PitneyBowes had two more
ads later on. I mention all of these ads because it added incredibly
to the experience I had as I was reading the articles.
Page 38 and 38 had a section on gadgets called "Rightstuff" with a
larger than life picture of the cool toy of 2007 the AppleiPhone, and
other cool stuff. To even throw me off the scent even more page 40 and
41 is a two page ad for FileMaker Pro 8.5.
They even had a marketplace section in the back with the 1/4 page ad
for one of those endless lap pools, and the inside back cover has an
ad for the United States Post Office package delivery, and the outside
back cover is Dell hawking laptops.
I read several of the articles, and they were extremely well written
and very valuable to someone like me. What bothered me is this
magazine seemed too perfect. Kind of like some sort of Stepford Wife
magazine, so I dug a little deeper, or rather looked harder at the
cover and publisher's page.
Sage Software. Hum. Home of Mas500 ERP, Mas90&200 ERP, who knows how
many other commercial ERP's that they own today. They sent this to me.
My point is that this was executed to perfection. It cost a Gazillion
$USD, but it was done perfectly. I don't know if they embedded some
sort of pheromone to make me like Sage better, or if they did
something with hidden images, but after I got done reading it, I
thought, "Hum those people at Sage must know something about business
to come up with a magazine like this."
There was only one advertisement for Sage, and it was an ad that ran
across the bottom of two pages, had a cute woman in the middle of one
of those 360 degree photographs who was "Mangaging everything from
payroll to paper cuts. That's Sage 360."
I wonder if that's going to be a stumbling block for future acceptance
of open source based ERP installations, or is it an opportunity if we
move soon. Maybe it's not the pointy haired boss, but rather how to we
reach out to the "pony tailed boss?" Women really don't think like
men. They view relationships differently than men. They look at visual
items in the perspective of seeing themselves, vs. men looking at
visual items as somthing of attainment.
How do we reach out to women? That might be how this project remains
effective and thriving in the next decade.
--
Walter
