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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, May 26, 2008

Mine’s better than yours – and his

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I’ve noticed a trend in recent presentations of T&M products that I think is something of a concern. As I’m sure you are aware, from time to time the equipment manufacturers gather together the representatives of the technical press, and present their latest innovations. Standard form for these events is a slab of PowerPoint and, usually, the new product doing a star turn with some demonstration or other. The demos are of mixed success; since the editors are (mostly) some way away form being working engineers, their ability to assess the worth of demo is limited: about all we can do is get some sort of feel for how it lives up to the content of the PowerPoint. (Conversely, when the PowerPoint has made a point of how easy the unit is to operate, and then the presenter ties himself in knots doing the demo, this tells its own story.)
It may be too early to call it a trend; but on a couple of occasions lately, the promo team from, let’s call it Brand Q, will show up not only with their own product, but those of Brand P as well; and perhaps even one from Brand R (initials have been changed to protect the innocent). These get used to show not only how good the product being presented is, but how much poorer (in some key spec point) are those of the opposition. A bit of rough-and-tumble in marketing is reasonable, so why am I concerned?
Firstly, the “opposition” units will likely be from rental providers – they may not be the most directly-comparable competitive product, but perhaps the nearest available. Then (while I do, of course, trust the presenters to make as fair a comparison as they can manage) as I have no detailed knowledge of how to drive any of the boxes, I can’t judge if the comparison is indeed on a level field. More than that, I don’t even know if the presenters themselves really know how to get the best out of their competitors’ products (though I can be pretty certain they’ll know how to get the best out of their own!). All in all, I’m inclined to heavily discount these competitive comparisons when they are done by one side only.
I think this may be happening because of the trend in instrumentation that almost every box is a measurement front-end plus a whole lot of digital processing. In many sectors, all of brands P, Q and R – and perhaps several others – can do the basic measurement bit just fine. It’s what happens downstream in the processing and presentation that makes the difference in the product. And that might – or so some marketing departments could say – best be revealed by a side-to-side comparison.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m likely to take heed of such comparisons only if they are conducted in a rather more objective environment (tough to arrange, I grant you). For my taste, the product managers should stick to presenting their own claims about the superiority of their own products – and which claims I will then relay to you – and leave the side-by-side demos until you (the prospective purchaser) call them into your lab.
Or am I worrying too much ?

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