This commercial about a person trying to buy a laptop for less than $1,000 and going for an HP w/ Windows instead of Mac just show how technology companies (big and small alike) don’t get it: it’s not the technology.
Pretty much all technology companies are founded and ran by technologists and we (yes, I’m a technologist as well) tend to think different. We like numbers. We like to compare things. We like to evaluate options and come up with a formula which once we input the data will give us the definitive answer: Will you buy or rent a house? Will you lease or buy a car? Should you run your own server or use a cloud solution? Should you hire 4 developers in the US or 7 in Asia? That’s how engineers and most business people think.
Turns out that’s not how customers make purchase decisions. Your customers don’t care if your product has 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code. They don’t care if your software has 2MB or 7MB to download. They don’t care about Windows vs. Linux on the server. They simply don’t care.
Customers care primarily about their usage of the product. Is it something enjoyable? Do they need it? Do they want it? What color is it? What colors can they chose from? Will I look good in front of my friends if I tell them I’ve been using this product?
Yes, I’m a wounded technologists by the marketing battles I fought and lost. It’s like I brought a bullet-proof vest, but they came with the torch-throwers. Then I’ve brought the fire-extinguisher and they built a moat, and I build a bridge and they weren’t there.
Marketing is a battle that most technologists are not prepared to fight. They don’t even know what they don’t know. Most startups are going to suffer (and fail) because of their lack of understanding on how to do marketing. And no matter how much I talk about this, pretty much all entrepreneurs will say they understand the importance of marketing or understand marketing itself.
Microsoft trying to make the Mac vs. PC fight to be about price is just to show how clueless their marketing department is about what customers are looking for.
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
