🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <179280008@pandora>, tmn_ <Douglass Carmichael <carmike@t> writes...
> 
>If groupware is built around a product, like hospital design, its
>predisposed to come up with "hospital" at the end, reagardless of how
>participatory the process is. My own experience with electgronic
>conferencing (Metanet, Well) is that open conversation can restructure the
>underlying gestalt by helping people get articulate about the total scene.
>I can se a coming stgruggle for marketplace survival between open and
>closed system groupware products.

    This last sentence is a very interesting point and I tend to agree with
    you.  But I think it is inevitable that the open system products will
    be the survivors.  The closed system products will not be able to
    generate enough revenue to keep their prices low while the open system
    products will be customizable to do the tasks of closed system
    products.

    So venders of products like GroupGraphics (Ventana Corp.) which right
    now seem to be marketed towards a particular niche (systems developers
    in this example) ought to rethink their focus and reposition themselves
    to a general market.

    The above statement certainly does not invalidate the academic work
    that many of us are doing where we are looking at groupware in
    particular market niches.  I would argue that my exploration of the
    architectural pre-design process combined with my experience with GDSS
    products in general has allowed me to discover new linkages that might
    not have been found without this combination of research areas.  And
    additional GDSS architectures (to mix meanings of this noun in one
    paragraph) will be found by others who explore different functional
    areas.  

    What we bring to GDSS can later be incorporated into general purpose
    tools.

===========================================================================
daniel david mittleman     -     danny@arizona.edu     -     (602) 621-2932

Daniel Mittleman writes:

    So venders of products like GroupGraphics (Ventana Corp.) which right
    now seem to be marketed towards a particular niche (systems developers
    in this example) ought to rethink their focus and reposition themselves
    to a general market.


Most of the high-tech marketing books that I have read (admittedly
few) have emphasized starting by targetting a niche, and only then
moving on to the general market.  The theory is that a company can't
develop every feature needed for the general market right from the
start.  Focusing on a single niche market concentrates the development
and marketing efforts, instead of spreading them too thinly.

So don't expect general *products* until the products have matured in
at least one niche first.

Most of this is covered well in "Crossing the Chasm", which I (as a
software engineer) have found to be very informative about marketing.

-- John Willmore
jaws@resumix.portal.com
Software Engineer, Resumix, Inc.