Pattern Finder

Free Webcast on My Productivity Suite Quadrant Report

As I noted in a post on the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog, Burton Group now offers two reports and a TeleBriefing on the subject of productivity suites. However, all three demand that a user have a subscription to Burton Group’s IT1 or CCS services. If you don’t have that kind of cash around but would like to watch a free webcast about my recently released Market Insight: Productivity Suites 2009 report, here it is on BrightTalk (it’s free, but requires a registration):

The Shifting Sands of Product Archetypes

It's taken me a long time to figure this out, but I recently realized that clients often view and describe products via archetypes. Rather than recounting a long laundry list of desired features, they'll say, "What I want is something like SharePoint, but with an additional capability." Initially, I classified this common way of talking as a time-saver, but I've come to realize its also a very useful market analysis tool--because the archetypes shift over time.

Let me give some examples. Way back when--40 years ago--if you wanted a really deluxe typewriter, you dreamed of an IBM Selectric. It looked cool, it had that nifty rotating ball, and made beautiful copies. When I entered college, my mind's eye was on a Selectric--but I made do with a Smith Corona. By the late 70's, people's mental image of the Selectric was replaced with a Wang Word Processor; which in turn eventually got replaced by a PC running Microsoft Word. Another example in terms of portable entertainment is the Sony Walkman; it got usurped by the Apple iPod. If your product is the archetype, you control the market conversation--your product is the baseline by which other products are described and evaluated.