marketing

OK, I am not a marketing guy. I know how to use Porter's Five Forces analysis, and I always happily escape to it when I have no real idea about the subject matter, but that's about it. Being so ignorant in marketing, I used to share the general misconception that pretty, female face can sell products like a magic - anywhere, everywhere. Well, now I know better.

Our friends at the Development Seed published a very interesting blog post today explaining how sexy, female faces may not be effective for online marketing. Check it out - very nice reading.

You probably know that CeBIT is going full force, right now. As you would expect from a leading IT and telecom trade fair, loads of new interesting solutions were presented. However, one stands out, right away. Not so much with its features but rather by price - $1,500 for a keyboard? And it's not even platinum-plated or carrying proud tag of some insanely famous designer.

Optimus Maximus is a creation of Russian web/industrial design company Art. Lebedev Studio. Each key on this keyboard is an OLED screen that can be programmed to display any character. So, effectively, the keyboard is fully customizable. Cool, but... it ends up costing more than any keyboard you have ever seen. According to some reports, it also "features" a constant high-pitch noise from all the OLED goodness, but we have not tried it so - maybe not.

In any case, even with the supposedly breakthrough approach to designing keyboards, the first reaction when you look at the price tag is inevitably in line with one of the comments to the wired.com blog post: "These Commie douches must be out of their arrogant minds. $1500 for a keyboard? Yeah, right, how about - GET REAL?". However, if you give it a second thought you may appreciate the marketing genius behind the price. Seriously, if not the scandalous price tag, what else would make this gadget appear on the front-page of the wired.com coverage of CeBIT and be a highlight of the show?

Well, maybe the "commie douches" are not so stupid, after all and they've learned a thing or two about Shock Advertising from their Western brothers? Maybe... We'll see how this one goes and if the keyboard will capture any real market. In my humble opinion, unless they significantly drop the price very soon, they will prove right the wired.com commenter.

Sun Microsystems is a decent company with arguable marketing strategies. A shiny example of the desperation of their marketing team has recently appeared on the homepage of Sun's Java website:

Honestly, I have no idea why is Sun of such low opinion of its target audience. I would doubt that JEE developer community can not see through the obvious gibberish of the ad.

Seriously, what does Java EE 5 offer to building Web 2.0 applications? Does it come with a set of templates that adhere to the Web 2.0 Culture? Does it even come with a user-interface engine or theming engine that does? (If you comment anything about "JSF", i will ban your IP from this blog, I swear) Does it have some groundbreaking AJAX implementation embedded? Is it Agile to develop in and easy to interface to? Does it even come with an RSS/Atom and OPML parser/generator? Or does it just come with bloated implementations of SOAP and handful of other, modified to the extent of being almost-proprietary, XML-based protocols?

Is that it? OK, but does it make Java EE 5 SOA-ready? Do you mean, consequently it is - Web 2.0?