I read an interesting post today by Nima Dilmaghani on How best to announce a new technology. It got me thinking about the many different ways companies bring new products and technologies to market. Microsoft clearly favors the big splash approach, saving up product news and software release goodies for big tent events like MIX or PDC.
As this New York Times article outlines, Apple is famously paranoid about leaks pertaining to its product announcements, and the company runs a tight ship (or lip) in controlling the news agenda leading up to their big announcements. That is hardly surprising when Apple’s business thrives on creating near hysterical enthusiasm for its new products from a crowd of Apple devotees. Tuaw (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) likes to quote Steve Jobs as saying, “there is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets.”
We’ve come to expect a different perspective from Google, and their cerebral approach to making product announcements is suitably unique. Nima’s blog takes the perfect example of Google’s App Engine which was released to an invite only group of developers at Google Campfire One last year.
Rather than unveiling App Engine at their big annual developer conference, Google I/O, they chose to distribute it to a small and influential group at the Campfire event. By the time Google I/O rolled around a month later, this key group of developers had already begun using the App Engine development stack to build and host their own web apps. The Google I/O audience had enjoyed significant exposure to App Engine before the conference, and attendees had more meaningful responses than “wow” or “bah” which is what you typically hear at traditional launch events.
So “Big Splash” or “Invite Only” — which approach is better? I think that depends on your audience to a large extent. Enterprise software buyers are notoriously laggard in adopting new technologies, so Microsoft likes to make a big public splash about a new technology long before it is market-ready. It’s fair to say that this approach has many critics, but perhaps it’s effective for their primary audience.
Azure is a case in point — it was announced at PDC 2008 in a keynote by Ray Ozzie and is only now taking shape in terms of scope, pricing, and service-level details. Perhaps this is a clever ploy by Microsoft, because they enjoy 12 months of drip-feeding the slow-grazing enterprise market with a new technology, while the press keeps Azure alive in the minds of cautious enterprise buyers.
Once Azure is ready for prime-time (soon, by all accounts), the market is well primed to receive a more familiar, less threatening technology that has been in the lexicon for some time. In fact, you could argue that Azure has almost achieved the status of a released product due to the level of coverage in the technology press, well before the vision has come within spitting distance of reality.
Google, on the other hand, works through their powerful developer community to build niche technologies and disseminate them early. Rather than rolling out a shrink-wrapped solution, developers will build on the App Engine platform and adopt it to their needs. This approach taps into the wisdom of crowds, leveraging the momentum of community-based development, and it relies less on PR than it does on grass roots adoption.
Different strokes for different markets perhaps, but as we all know, the lines between Enterprise and Consumer are blurring every day. You would need one hell of a campfire to warm all the seats at PDC 2009, but perhaps the blow-out conference model is starting to change. Now that Steve Jobs is back at the helm, I wouldn’t count on more low key announcements from Apple, however. To each their own…
