Walter,
I found your post really interesting. More so because I come from the
same place as Sage - Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. I had no idea they were
making such an impact in North Carolina. Thanks for taking the trouble
to let us know.
I don't know about the differences between men and women, but I do know
quite a lot about how Sage was founded and how it developed.
I think I've already mentioned some of this in a previous post, but it
might be worth going into a little more depth here.
My Dad sold printing machines. One of his customers was a small printing
company in Newcastle called Campbell Graphics, run by a guy called David
Goldman. Throughout the early eighties, Dad passed on a string of tales
about how Goldman had hired this student from Newcastle University who
was develop an accounting package for the new microcomputers in his
spare time. I had been working mainframes so thought microcomputers were
nothing more than toys and developing software for them nothing more
than a joke. My Dad didn't agree. But he was just a common-or-garden
printer who had left school at 15. What did he know? Well, as it turned
out, quite a lot more than me actually. How many times have I kicked
myself since for not listening to him?
For the first couple of years I was proved right. They sold less than a
hundred! But the tipping point turned out to be the launch of the
Amstrad PCW. I thought that was an even bigger joke. Whilst Intel are
releasing the 80286 and Microsoft are releasing DOS, Amstrad launches
machines running obsolete 8-bit Z80s running CP/M? Do me a favour! But
Goldman didn't think so. He adapted Sage to run on CP/M and watched
sales leap to 300 month!
For the full Goldman story see
http://www.davidgoldman-sage.com/Entrepenuer_Resume.htmAnd the moral of the tale (apart from the perils of not listening to
your father's advice?
Well, a couple of quotes from the Goldman story stand out:
>
> Even in these early days he was driven by customer needs. “The
> Customer is King” was the title of a large and colourful poster of
> a Lion behind his desk.
>
> From the outset the emphasis of the company was on marketing - being
> driven by the needs of the customer rather than the technology. In
> fact David said, “Sage is a marketing company that happens to sell
> software.” Branding was everything to the fledgling company, and
> everything was done in order to create and then strengthen the Sage
> brand. This approach allowed Sagesoft, as it was by this stage, to
> achieve market dominance, overtaking their competitors, all of whom
> already had products selling in the market place.
>
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my Dad used to say :)
Ian
Walter Vaughan wrote:
> Over the past year I have read about the lack of PR around ofBiz, and
> getting pointy haired bosses to accept something as wild as ofBiz as
> "best of breed" rather than "well this is cheaper, so lets do this".
>
> Today in my mail with about 5 or 6 magazines, was a copy of a magazine
> called "businessminds"... "Smart Ideas to help run your business".
>
> This thing is a true work of art.
>
> The cover had a glued on outside front page with an engaging picture
> of a cute 20-30 something woman on her way to her corner office, and
> the bottom half had a offer to win a free Dell laptop. The real cover
> has a pair of conductor hands with a lead article entitled "On Being a
> LEADER", and other teasers as if it was just magazine like Baseline,
> CIO...
>
> Inside front cover is a two page spread from GM leasing. Page 5 has ad
> for a Chevy Pickkup, page 7 has ad from CDW and McAfee, page 9 has
> PitneyBowes selling a small business meter with a 60 day free trial
> and $50 postage, oddly on page 13 PitneyBowes thinks that I should buy
> my toner cartridges from them. Packet8 had a two page spread on page
> 18 and 19 on their hosted VOIP solution, and PitneyBowes had two more
> ads later on. I mention all of these ads because it added incredibly
> to the experience I had as I was reading the articles.
>
> Page 38 and 38 had a section on gadgets called "Rightstuff" with a
> larger than life picture of the cool toy of 2007 the AppleiPhone, and
> other cool stuff. To even throw me off the scent even more page 40 and
> 41 is a two page ad for FileMaker Pro 8.5.
>
> They even had a marketplace section in the back with the 1/4 page ad
> for one of those endless lap pools, and the inside back cover has an
> ad for the United States Post Office package delivery, and the outside
> back cover is Dell hawking laptops.
>
> I read several of the articles, and they were extremely well written
> and very valuable to someone like me. What bothered me is this
> magazine seemed too perfect. Kind of like some sort of Stepford Wife
> magazine, so I dug a little deeper, or rather looked harder at the
> cover and publisher's page.
>
> Sage Software. Hum. Home of Mas500 ERP, Mas90&200 ERP, who knows how
> many other commercial ERP's that they own today. They sent this to me.
>
> My point is that this was executed to perfection. It cost a Gazillion
> $USD, but it was done perfectly. I don't know if they embedded some
> sort of pheromone to make me like Sage better, or if they did
> something with hidden images, but after I got done reading it, I
> thought, "Hum those people at Sage must know something about business
> to come up with a magazine like this."
>
> There was only one advertisement for Sage, and it was an ad that ran
> across the bottom of two pages, had a cute woman in the middle of one
> of those 360 degree photographs who was "Mangaging everything from
> payroll to paper cuts. That's Sage 360."
>
> I wonder if that's going to be a stumbling block for future acceptance
> of open source based ERP installations, or is it an opportunity if we
> move soon. Maybe it's not the pointy haired boss, but rather how to we
> reach out to the "pony tailed boss?" Women really don't think like
> men. They view relationships differently than men. They look at visual
> items in the perspective of seeing themselves, vs. men looking at
> visual items as somthing of attainment.
>
> How do we reach out to women? That might be how this project remains
> effective and thriving in the next decade.
>
> --
> Walter
>
>
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