Search Vendor Management: Frazzled and Scared
October 24, 2013
Generalizations are terrible. Generalization can be useful. I read “Why Being a Thinker Means Pocketing Your Smartphone.” The story appeared on the CNN Web site. I find this amusing, since CNN is associated in my mind with content delivery for those with some sort of dependence on TV filtered information. The key point in the write up struck me as:
“You can’t make headway without thinking about a problem for a long time, in collaboration with smart researchers from different fields, as well as reading a lot,” says epidemiologist Caroline Buckee, one of CNN’s 10 Thinkers for 2013. “But sometimes that hard work reaches fruition or comes together at a random time once you have let thoughts settle down.” We know this — as surely as that 20th-century magnate knew it — and yet we regularly ignore the advice. We surf the Web; we scan news on our phones; we keep our minds digitally occupied in a million ways. When we have a few minutes of down time now, we pull out our mobile devices instead of daydreaming.
The statement is only partially correct. Let me narrow the focus to behavior influenced by uncertainty about what actions to take and the insecurity generated by not having a product or service that people want to pay for.,
Think about your last interaction with a vendor of search, content processing, and analytics. How did the interaction flow? I have noticed since the summer vacations ended and management of search vendors focused on making money that two words characterize many behaviors of the senior management of search and content processing companies. The two words?
Frazzled and Scared
What do I mean?
Here are some recent example:
- Information promised on a specific date has not been provided six weeks later. The fact that the information was needed for a potential investor adds to the spice of the incident.
- A statement “We will meet at the X conference” became three weeks later, “We are traveling outside the United States”
- An assurance that customer support would provide an activation key to a search system generated four additional assurances. But no key arrived.
At a recent conference, I noticed:
- A vendor who beamed when a colleague and I approached the booth. The vendor launched into a series of questions about budget, decision time, and internal staffing capabilities. When I pointed out that I did analyses for my clients, the vendor turned off the charm and moved to another “fish”
- Four vendors in four consecutive presentations said, “We do real time content processing of all information.”
- One company president had beads of perspiration on his forehead as he talked on his mobile phone in a corner of the booth. He looked fearful.
So what?
Based on the information in our Overflight system, a number of search and content processing vendors are no longer updating their blogs with regular posts of a substantive nature. The flow of emails about free webinars and new products is on the rise. I received a half dozen on Wednesday, October 23, 2013. For example:
Might you have a few minutes for a call with Mike Schmitt, Senior Director of Product Management for Astute Networks, to discuss the paper and its findings? It is interesting how even today, smart IT executives are still thinking about storage cost only in terms of the device, vs. the extended consequence it has across performance and productivity, as well as business flexibility and agility.
The “paper” is one of those azure chip, toot toot things. Sigh.
I also am inundated with messages about the “crisis” in search, the lack of traffic to search vendors’ Web sites, and the death of “leads”.
Perhaps the search and content processing companies should step back, take a deep breath, and consider the impact of wild and crazy statements, odd duck behavior at trade shows, and a panhandler’s approach to revenue generation.
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