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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The death of Cobalt
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I am more than happy to let you know that the marketing budget set aside for Cobalt in Australia was%A0$0 for the 10 months I was with them. Sun did not understand Cobalt, and tried to mould it into their way of thinking, however we were selling to a different space, and they could never quite fathom that.
A clear marketing failure - company buys a product, has no idea what to do with it, and said product withers and dies. That irritates the customers of that product (possibly poisoning them against considering the buying company's products in the future). It wastes all the resources (monetary and otherwise) spent on the purchase. And it wastes the time spent fumbling the bought entity. I've seen this myself - at ParcPlace, back in the post IPO days, management bought a lot of things - including VSE - which they had no idea how to sell or market. It kind of makes you wonder why they bother - it's known that there's no real plan (at least at some level) - you would think someone would raise the alarm. In many respects, it's a sign that no one is willing to question management, which is a very bad sign - for employees and for management. These kinds of marketing failures tend to get repeated, exhausting resources. What many companies seem to need is a no s*** guy who's willing to ask hard questions....
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