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Is a product’s success all about marketing????




I have always wondered about how companies decide when to launch a product... How they decide that the market needs that product etc?

And after all that analysis how come many products end up flopping? I am in touch with the tech sector and so will refer to it for examples.

Let’s take Windows Vista as an example... It was a failure.... I know many people will say that 24% of the world today uses Vista but that was because all the new models sold had only vista as an option...Microsoft stopped selling XP.... I’m sure the ppl at Microsoft must have done a great analysis as to why this would have happened....But I believe the major reason for the failure was marketing... Apple jumped on people’s inertia about changing from XP to vista and screwed up the image of vista badly… I don't think any OS is better than any other but Apple somehow managed to convince people that their products are much better so they get to even charge a premium price.

And what bout Linux???? It runs almost 80% of servers everywhere yet it is not even known in the consumer market. Is the OS not good?? It’s very good... it’s free... yet completely unknown... The major reason for this I believe is bcos no company owns Linux and so no company want to advertise for it.

At the end all that matters is how people perceive a product. People have problems if their phones hang up but are ready to adjust if their computer does the same??? Why?? Bcos Microsoft has created an illusion that phones are much simpler devices (which apple is breaking with the I Phone) while computers are not.... And people’s perception is built on how the companies show their products to be. This really makes me believe that Marketing is all that matters for a product... nah... even for a company.... It’s the brand they build that matters.. quality??? nope... just suppress any bad news....(most companies do this)...... 

I hope I am wrong and hope that the quality of a product matters finally but the present scenario in the tech sector tells a completely different story....What do u think????


- Alok


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