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November 12, 2004
High end
Over lunch I listened to Eve talking about clustering market segments. If you've never heard of a cluster before, it's a set of computers functioning together such that failures don't bring services down. A service is something that a server provides, like email delivery, database access, web access, directory access, etc.
Anyway, in the cluster world, Sun has traditionally provided solutions for high-end customers. High-end customers have businesses that depend upon their ability to provide continuous services. When their services stop, they immediately start losing money, often lots of it. So they are ready to pay architectural insurance, buying duplicate hardware, running extra software, accepting the cost of high-end machines. Sun has also been in the business of providing Directory Server to this kind of customer.
Some of the money we may have been leaving on the table comes from people buying what marketing calls good enough products, in that they're good enough for people who want protection, but either have to do it on a very tight budget, or aren't in a situation so serious that they cannot afford a little risk. We sell more of this low-end hardware now. In fact, it sounds like we sell it more cheaply than competitors.
Marketing would like us to focus some energy on good enough software that perhaps provides less disaster protection but is expected to run on cheap hardware. At least two difficulties come to mind here:
- How do we define good enough?
- Low-end customers are going to expect ease of use, but our stuff, being high-end, has traditionally been super configurable at the expense of ease of use. What tweakability is right for the low end?
It sounds like the answer to the first might be, "Listen carefully to prospects." We're doing a better job on that than we have been doing before. We can also benefit from looking at what our competition has settled for, since what we can do is often a superset of what they can do. And that sort of helps answer the second question. There's more to it than that, of course.
Posted by Mark at November 12, 2004 03:08 PM