In his rather influential book on Google, Jeff Jarvis describes how successful companies on the web need to “bring their customers into their processes”, and by using open and transparent communications when things go wrong, companies will not only maintain but enhance their users trust.
In a really inspiring series of posts to his blog, Martin Daly has described the efforts his company Cadcorp has gone through to deliver a robust and high performance web system to one of their customers.
Very few GIS companies would have opened up in such detail to describe the difficulties and problems associated in delivering a solution to meet a challenging set of requirements, and to be so frank about the process.
Cadcorp and Martin emerge very well from the exercise, OK so our software may a few problems but we know how to fix them and will work hard to do so, and we will show you how we did it in public.
A example for many others in the GIS industry…
(geek test : Recognise the engineering solution in the image ?)
Written and Submitted from the San Francisco Airport (37.613N, 122.390W)
2 replies on “A lesson in technical product marketing”
(It’s how you scrub CO2 from the air with only LiOH canisters and spare parts from a lunar module.)
Fully subscribe to this honesty model. The trap to be avoided, ofcourse, is that you then actually do have to do something about it! Otherwise you’ll lose trust faster than ever and it will be much harder to win back.
(I guess the clue to your picture question is in the image title 😉 )