Most of the time we try to obey the 3 Bs: Better, Bigger, Bolder. This is also true for our marketing activities, as well as for our blog posts. But here’s a little secret I can tell you about our industry (and not just it): when it’s time to walk the walk, we are all slaves of the almighty RFP.
As our industry caters mainly for large enterprises and government agencies, a lot of the deals out there are won based on a Request For Proposal, or RFP. In a RFP, the customers outline the list of features they are looking for, and they are usually derived from or written by one of the vendors, to make sure the competition will fail to comply, due to their lack of unnecessary (not to mention stupid) features.
The use of RFPs in our industry made the competition revolve all around feature lists – not real benefits. This comes at a cost. Or as the Cranky PM complained lately:
“How? Because DysfunctoSoft has NEVER, EVER thrown out a feature, truly de-supported a platform, or dropped an obsolete product. No matter how decrepit, bug-ridden and just FOUL that hardly-used-but-now-completely-obsolete feature is. No matter how ridiculously costly it is to continue supporting that horrible Active X plug-in from 10 years ago. Who really cares if the thing integrates with Adobe Reader 4 anymore????”
If there’s a good example for this hoarding in our industry, it’s the video codecs issue in our products:
You’ve probably heard about H.264. Maybe even H.263. But is anyone here, who isn’t dealing working for a video company, familiar with H.261? It’s about the first video codec that was ever conceived. So old and useless, but it is frequently a mandatory item in RFPs. Why? Because nobody really needs it. But we are all forced to support it for some arcane reason.
There are more like this example, but I guess this one tops it all.
Why Should You Care?
We’re investing a lot of our time on the feature list. It takes a lot of effort and defocuses companies from what really matters to customers – bringing real benefits, trying to improve the video quality for example.
What should you do about it?
My first feeling would be to say ditch the RFP and start looking for the benefits you actually need. But it won’t work. Not in our industry.
So my real suggestion would be to know what the useless features are and decide if you really need them or can simply drop them out of the next RFP you write.
Tags: codecs, competition, enterprise, Focus, H.264, Market, quality, software, video conferencing, VoIP
Comment or trackback
1. Mick Marrs | February 25th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
I work in developing/systems integrating voip services at a large telco. We are trying to develop a SIP trunking service, but we have taken so long because the requirements were copied from a Nortel digital switch feature list. So I have to explain why we don’t a ISDN D channel on our SIP trunks and why we can exceed the 23 D channels … makes me cry.
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