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Homeopathic Marketing: Traveler on my Android is now calling itself VERSE. Allow me to translate that for the IBM Notes community...
By Andrew Pollack on 06/02/2015 at 02:23 PM EDTI noticed today that my Traveler applications on Android have started calling themselves "IBM Verse" (e.g. "IBM VERSE - 2 New Messages"). I was confused at first, because I hadn't connected my test account on the IBM Verse cloud offering to my primary email at all. It turns out that no such connection exists. It's just a name change.
Allow me to translate:
Someone, or some group, fairly highly placed within the IBM adminisphere has finally come to the realization that the IBM Verse cloud offering (what we previously just called "IBM Verse") is not going to make them a huge pile of money as a stand alone product. It's not going to compete with GMAIL for end user mailbox attention. As a business strategy, it's just not going to drive anything significant.
What you're seeing is the traditional IBM practice of dilution and spread of failed product names into brand category names, mixing the name with more successful and diverse products before the stink of failure can become associated with any particular executive group. I have coined a name for this practice.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: "Homeopathic marketing".
They do this, of course, because people who know what Traveler is, love it. Almost universally. End users love it. Administrators love it. People who know what Verse is, generally hate it. Not everyone, but a lot of them. So lets take the product with the name people are positive about and paint the name people hate on it, because it's far more important to avoid the stink of failure at the executive level than to continue to have a product the market associates with positively.
dictionary word. It's part of the evil thinking that generates things like
"Kwik" in business names.
I went with Homeopathic because I associate that with the purposeful dilution
of the key ingredient to the point where it is utterly useless. In this case,
responsibility for the decision to spend vast amounts of market and financial
capital on yet another attempt to get people bought into the Portal
architecture.
the very end of an IBM tech note. On what "Smarter Planet" would this ever
make sense to do? (both the rebranding of a product in Fix Pack and not telling
anyone except in obscure places.)
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'homeopathic' though. I associate that with 'small doses' or 'it's only a
smokescreen because it doesn't work'.
On the plus, side, it avoids the painful 'missing l' syndrome every time I read
Traveler (which we brits spell Traveller).