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Vendor A wasn't popular politically, but won on technical merit. Vendor B was a serious player, and had previously held 80% of the market in that segment, but (a) had fallen behind technically, and (b) their presentation had truly been Keystone Kops level bad, unfortunately. They simply didn't take it seriously; they expected to win on name recognition, so they basically just phoned it in.
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a competitive analysis for my boss to justify my rankings, and I wrote about 20 pages, detailing the scoring criteria I used, my observations and analysis, etc. Some of the vendors were extremely interested in this (vendor C, in particular, since they just missed the final round by a whisker),
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Vendor C, in contrast, flew up two guys (one business guy, one tech) to take me out to lunch/dinner and get a Vulcan Mind Meld with me; their approach was "we came in number three, what do we need to improve to be number one".
A year later, Vendor B was sitting at 20% of the market, and unlikely to hang on to that, as both Vendor A and Vendor C had passed them. ...
I think I speak for everyone here when saying...I would really like to read that report.
I am thinking of how I could respond to this. I'm sure that "Wait, was "B" Microsoft?" would get me +5 silly. But this is probably more serious.
Company C -- whoever they are, whatever they do -- sounds like a company I'd like to work for. It's sounds much better than most of the companies I have worked for.
This is, in a nutshell, the market at its finest.
There is a serious view: If you do not improve, you will be overtaken by those that do. Historically, in this industry (Tech), the "improvements" are more likely to come from within -- from elsewhere in the same company. We've seen time and again, companies that sit on an improvement because it will hurt their big department, with IBM being the single biggest such example that I know of; and "biggest example" only because they were the biggest company for the longest. Which company has the highest rate of this, I don't know.
Historically, we see companies that say "We won't improve; no one else is close to us, and improvement helps division C less than stagnation helps division B."
Here, we see "We won't improve; we think no one else is close to us", and improvement helps company C more than stagnation helped company B.
This is what we need to see more of. And I'd love to know who the "new kid to watch out for", C, is.
So, was B microsoft?