Marketenomics!
I was taking part in a Multimedia Forum for past two days. It was organised by our partner Processor manufacturing company and basically a business development meet. Me and my managers represented our company. The tutorial session in the starting session of forum were very much sales talks, you know. Then followed by one-on-one ragging(!) of us by those marketing guys. We had nearly five sessions with different business unit heads, some meetings were technical, some were typical marketing. My business directors from Fremont were supposed to attend this forum. As all the acqusition business came up in company, We had to represent the company. (Pooh, it was more fill-gap arrangement). Neverthless, I loved it because it is my first business development meet and oppurtunity.
There were quite few insights about the business model we are running in:
The software billing for mobile handsets run at sub 1$. Which basically means more the volume, more will be the revenue generated for the company. The kind of competition we face in marketing the product is scary. The solace is that my company has past history of giving competitions a run for their money. The past success aren't guarantee for future business growth (sounds like mutual funds investments, right? but thats true). The kind of application we are talking about in the company here are yet to see it market's genesis, looks like we are working in air at times.
I spoke about the business model of PC division before.The PC business model is much more sane, scalable and has enough ammunitions than the embedded business. We have core competency in codecs development. We are looking at the full system development in DTV space. DTV inturn can jump into multiple verticals like mobile TV, DVB-H, 1seg DTV, in-car entertainment. We work with competitive processor development companies too. But all these yet to see a green bucks rain till now. Sounds depressing! but can't help it either.
In conclusion, I have a confusion over the future of embedded market as such all over the world. Are all our folks working in to build some castle out of nowhere? With this confusion, I was browsing in my google reader, got struck by this post of Guy Kawasaki. I take his words as is "My theory is that when you’re young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world". It's better to sit back and concentrate on my work now. Leave all this business deals and worries to my business development managers. Eventually this will come to me, till then I am active listener!
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