Every year I take a step back to look at the solutions we’re providing. The goal is to ensure the holistic, “big picture” results DistinctAV is known for are being achieved. In an industry as complex as ours, it’s important to stay one step ahead so we can avoid the rise and fall of all the over-hyped products.
Here’s a summary of my most recent assessment: Read the rest of this entry »
LEED HOUSE FOR SALE:
5800 sqft in excellent neighborhood with great floorplan. Does not have convenient lighting control system, house music, or integrated security system. No consolidated entertainment system but you can still have ugly electronics components all over the house and maybe even some wires installed outside along the walls by the cable/phone/sat guys. No convenient custom remotes to easily control everything. No structured wiring engineered by a systems integration pro so there is no easy way to add the missing features if you wanted to. LEED certified builder built this incredibly tight home with excellent insulation but there’s no zoned A/C and the units are oversized so it’s never comfortable in all the rooms. Read the rest of this entry »
Marketing is the art and science of determining what people want to buy and how to advertise it to appeal to their needs.
Product manufacturers often miss the connection between marketing and product development.
Many OEMs have Product Development and Sales/Advertising teams. When the CEO wants more sales volume, they often add Business Development teams filled with the top sales people they can find.
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Almost everybody knows the frustration of shopping for home electronics. There are dozens of options with hundreds of features and thousands of combinations.
Add the hundreds of real-life scenarios and situations where and how you will use these systems, and let’s not forget everything that you don’t know or have not experienced yet.
Confused? Frustrated? Vapor-lock set in yet? It should. It’s perfectly normal for any rational person.
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I’ve changed my own oil in our cars for years but with my busy schedule (and the van was was 2000 miles overdue) I took the bait when I saw a guy swinging a “No Wait” Jiffy Lube sign out at the street. It was 6 PM and the rush-hour traffic was starting to dwindle. I swung around the block into their lot.
So picture this: 4 grease monkeys in slightly dirty uniforms hanging around doing apparently nothing, looking like they needed one more client for the day so they could earn enough for cigarettes. I didn’t have a good feeling.
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The single biggest complaint I hear from really smart custom electronics integrators is: “Every time we try a new system, it looks great at first but then we find its limitations.”
Next thing from their mouth is usually “…and they don’t seem to care about what we are asking for.”
Welcome to NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here).
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A few months ago I switched all our IT infrastructure to Google Apps and other cloud solutions. The results have been tremendously successful and beneficial in many ways. Maintenance is reduced, quality of service has improved, and more importantly–we can focus on the actual work instead of the computer tools necessary to do the work. Anti-spam systems are still a hindrance but that’s a story for another day.
The Google Model focuses on doing the few things that are most important–and doing them very well. They looked at how people work and realized it’s the collaboration that’s important. Google Docs allows people to share and collaborate on a document’s content in real time meaning the results of the collaboration can be achieved faster with better results. It even stores revisions of your work so you can easily look back at what changed by all the collaborators. Again, important features based on NEED not BLING.
What they didn’t do is add lots of features that aren’t important. You can’t do typesetting-level formatting for example.
But really…do we NEED to make our working documents look presentation-ready? Shouldn’t we be focusing on getting the content right and communicating clearly with our team and our clients?
So how does this apply to home electronics?
The last thing I want is my house constantly telling me how much energy I’m using. It’s bad enough that we have interruption machines like Twitter and IM.
Now everybody with an embedded controller and a website is trying to charge $10/mo to give you constant updates at your iPhone.
I created ControlMyBuilding.com back in 1998 to monitor and report on energy consumption and occupancy status for commercial buildings.
The reporting is useful to help gently modify occupant behavior so they’ll reduce waste but there’s no benefit in telling a human to constantly turn off the lights, set back the thermostat, and close the windows.
You’ll spend more time and energy trying to save energy. And does that really improve your quality of life?
There’s a frustrating trend in product development that results in products that do not completely satisfy the consumer.
Product designers strongly consider Sales Features as part of the Functional Requirements. The sale takes a tin fraction of the product’s lifecycle, whereas the product is typically expected to perform its other tasks for many years.
I’m not saying sales should not be considered but it should not be the leading decision factor.
I take enormous pride in my work and treat every project as though I was developing a masterpiece. While almost anyone can buy a DistinctAV system, there are a few people in the world I would like to meet and work with–just because I find them interesting.
Here’s my list. If you’re on it and have a project in mind. Have your people call my people.