Software Business in the Middle East

I have assured myself once again that making a good presentation is not an easy task. Otherwise, how to explain the fact that I fall asleep from the majority of the presentations I have seen so far?

There was Health Insurance Conference finished a few days ago in Abu Dhabi. The main problem during 90% of all presentations was fighting with sleepiness. I think that speakers who make such boring speeches would be kicked out without any free lunch.

But the organizers of the conference did actually a very good work. The huge advantage was that each speaker got maximum 20 minutes to talk about his or her topic. It helped people to keep themselves awake even if it was very boring presentation sometimes. Also, as a small thing, the folders and pens giving away to the participants as presents were of the excellent quality – this is something not very common in this part of the world.

As I noticed in both UAE and Saudi Arabia, the local conferences have couple interesting things. Almost any conference ends with the announcement that it was a successful event, thanking everybody for making it such a success. I always have hard time to understand what the criteria of conference success or failure are.

Also, all conferences end by giving presents to the speakers. It might be, for example, a nice looking ship model or glass medal with a speaker’s name on it. This time we got a ship as you see it on the picture above; click on it to get a larger one. It looks nice, really, and it is very heavy one

The conclusion is – if it is so hard to make a good presentation, you have to learn how to make your speech interesting and exciting to differentiate yourself. Any ideas how to do it?

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Time to time you might see really interesting events taken place in Dubai. One of them this week was a meeting with Craig Barett, the chairman of Intel.

It’s always interesting to listen to the people who have managed to make such amazing carrier as Craig – to see how they think and what they are doing at the moment. In his 69 Craig has clear mind and he seems having a lot of energy living very active live.

Below are just a few excerpts from that meeting.

History of Intel

The company was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. At that time it was not very common to get funded by venture capitalists – entrepreneurs borrowed money from banks. It was kind of difficult task for Intel founders to get money from a bank as their first business plan consisted of less than 180 words. Somehow they managed to find their first investor – Arthur Rock, whom Craig called as the first venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

Arthur Rock, by the way, was also an early investor in Apple – it seems this guy has an excellent sense of the right investment.

Entrepreneurship

There are three things needed for successful business – smart well educated people, smart idea and right environment. As an example, three large challenges for Microsoft didn’t come from other big competitors. The large challenges came from individual people who invented Netscape, Yahoo and Google.

Culture and Entrepreneurship

Craig had interesting discussion on how culture affects a number of people who want to start their own business. In Mexico, for instance, it’s not allowed to have a failure. If you fail, you become a looser there – so there are not so many people who want to take the risks. In other countries, where failure doesn’t mean bad thing, there are more people who become entrepreneurs.

It is good not to be afraid of failure, anyway.

Investments into Education

It is almost impossible to calculate the return of investments made into education. Probably, these investments are returned back one day when graduates start working for the company. Or graduates keep using the same products of the company in their daily jobs as they used to during their studing. But formally, there is no proper way to calculate if there is any return.

I appreciate the fact that Intel shareholders, according to Craig, have never expressed any concerns about investments made by Intel into education despite the fact that it is impossible to measure the profit.

Wal Mart in India

Somebody from the listeners asked the question about the protests against Wal Mart entering the Indian market. People over there have serious concerns that Wal Mart will kill small retailers.

Craig suggested to look at the situation from the consumer’s point of view. If Wal Mart gives no value to the customers, then it will definitely die. But if customers go to Wal Mart to buy stuff, it means Wal Mart adds some value for them. As result, small retailers might get closed. But at the end of the day it is a consumer who wins.

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Eric Sink has published his presentation from Business of Software conference. The original post is here and the presentation is available on this link.

I think that presentation is a very good and brief summary of what Eric has written so far on his blog about marketing for geeks, and I strongly recommend to read his blog through if you are running your own company or you want to start it. Few highlights from the presentation:

• The process of development and marketing is presented in a pseudo-code, something very clear for developers.
• Development is sandwiched between two marketing steps: (1) Decide What to Build as Strategy and (2) Tell Everybody About It as Communication. Developers tend to forget about step 1 thinking about step 2.
• Geeks are really bad at marketing, but almost everybody else is bad at marketing too.
• Excerpt: “We think of marketing and sales as something that can subtract value if it is done poorly, not as something that can add value if it is done well.”
• Example: Moving more expensive products on a web site on the top of the list of products increased the revenue by about 30%. This is the one of the shocking discoveries that cool features of your product is not the only source of you increased revenue.
• Excerpts: “Don’t compromise on product or craftsmanship, but respect the value of marketing. And sales.”
• Tendency to think that bad ideas are good, and good ideas are bad. The example is given for the product SourceOffSite – the kind of remote access for the SourceSafe. In the beginning Eric thought this product was a bad idea – but finally the revenue for this product for the past 9 years is $14,837,958.17. Not bad at all.
• Products would have more chances to get more sales if we stop thinking about technologies and programming languages and start thinking about how to solve real problems the normal people have.
• Great excerpts:
  • “Customers do not care what language my product is written in.“
  • “They don’t care about what library I used or how much fun I had learning a new technology or platform or tool.“
  • “They just want their problem solved, and many of them are seriously annoyed that they have to use a computer to do it.“
  • “The only way to overcome that annoyance and get their money is to create a product that is simply beautiful, and completely focused on what they want to do.”
• Marketing is not black and white as we used to in the binary world. Marketing and sales have a lot of gray. It affects that we think about competition as “get it all or nothing”. But truth is that normally there is no single company that takes all the market. Player number 5 or 10 might also have solid revenue too.
• As result, for sales and marketing you would ask question “How many people will buy my product?” rather than “Will people buy my product?”.
• Don’t be afraid of the competition – if you want to make a product that nobody else has made before, it might probably mean that nobody needs this product. Escaping the competition you escape your customers. (РК: Sure, there are some example of the niches where you can earn tones of money just because nobody have ever thought there would be any money).
• Finally – make your marketing and sales efforts to be fun for you. Marketing is not a miracle, and everybody can learn how to do it.
  

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