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In Reply to: RE: So, in your example above... posted by Dynobot on May 06, 2017 at 15:09:49
As someone who ran a company full of engineers and programmers engaged in the development of medical products, I have some small understanding of software and hardware.
I'm beginning to suspect that you DON'T, at least in reading your posts above regarding renderers, servers, LMS, PiCoreplayer, Squeezelite and the rest. When I asked for clarification, mostly regarding your use of terms, you didn't answer.
You instead fell back to posting simple definitions of hardware and software.
That's OK, I've got a fair bit of experience in that area as well. ;-)
Follow Ups:
As someone who ran a company full of engineers and programmers I'd suspect you would understand this simple stuff much easier.
Or were you just leading me along to see if I knew what you already have a keen understanding about...??I bet you know more about this stuff than anyone here...
Dynobots Audio - Music is the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth
Edits: 05/06/17
You must know that sentence might make NO SENSE AT ALL to someone not familiar with the Logitech Media platform. Which is fine because the person you directed your post to understood it.
And that's why I wasn't being at all critical when I admitted to being a bit confused and asked for clarification.
I have every confidence that I am capable of understanding this stuff. That's why I'm not afraid to raise my hand and ask questions when I don't.
I do appreciate that engineers and programmers are very bright people and I respect them a lot.
However, sometimes they forget that others may not share their depth of knowledge. That's why in my past life I found it best to minimize their contact with customers and ABSOLUTELY FORBID any contact with investors. ;-)
That's usually because they're more apt to tell the truth, and what you describe is a 'sales situation'..... And you know how to tell when a salesman is lying?....Right?
Cut-Throat
When he believes the engineer's promises.
Consumer product sales people are generally bad. I fully agree with Ivan on that fact. I was in high tech sales, marketing and management for years. I learned tow things: 1) You can't sell from an empty cart and 2) If you're going to sell something, pick a product that people want to buy.
A good sales person simply navigates a person to the correct product for whatever it is that they want to buy and has to be a knowledgeable and honest adviser. In high tech, my biggest problem was that we were always on the bleeding edge with new products. Engineers always gave us lists of features that would going to be in the product and delivery times that were optimistic. Inevitably, the delivery time doubled and the feature set was cut in half. Hence, if you trust the engineers, you may find yourself to be a liar down the way.
-Rod
"Hence, if you trust the engineers, you may find yourself to be a liar down the way."I think that depends on the engineer. If you're talking about engineers in product development that may be true. In my company, they don't speak to customers. They speak with company internal folks only, and usually through a product manager.
On the other hand customer facing engineers often need to keep the sales reps honest. After a sales rep stops speaking in a customer meeting, the customer turns and looks at the engineer. ;-) The customer facing engineer walks a thin line. Sometimes that thin line may piss off a sales rep possibly delaying a sale.
I was in that situation just two weeks ago. Customer is ready to cut a P.O. but the 'new version' is just on the horizon for next quarter.... and it's better and cheaper. I couldn't reveal details of this 'new version' but I mentioned it.
Fortunately in my company, the customer facing engineer does not work FOR the sales rep (but my sales reps are pretty honest guys). It's about a long term relationship as a trusted advisor vs a one time 'hit and run' sale.
Edits: 05/07/17
Like any generalization, the exceptions are all over the map.
I typically worked with smaller start up type companies. Having a technical background, I learned quickly which engineers and development folks were the stars and which ones I could trust and which that I couldn't. Usually, we didn't have the customer engineers, so if I had an engineer in a meeting, it was likely either the President of the company or the VP of Development.
But I hear you, a lot of sales people in tech know little more than the benefit list on the product brochure and have little understanding of the complexity and how the stuff really works. Of course the same is true for some engineers.
I remember a time when we were setting up a booth for a trade show and the engineer couldn't get the Micro VAX to boot up. He called back to HQ and got bounced around from one person to another and was getting nowhere. After a few hours of this, we were getting worried as to whether he could get this fixed which was critical and we were running out of time. Finally, my regional manager and I decided that we better get involved and find out exactly what was going on. It seemed like it was booting, but the terminal was getting gibberish. We checked the cabling and then thought, 'I wonder how the terminal is set up'. Sure enough, it was set up wrong. We changed it to 9,600 baud and bingo, fixed.
The engineer on site was a PhD, but had absolutely no common sense.
-Rod
Micro VAX? That's old stuff, probably from the same 1980's era as the LSI 11/73 Q-bus systems I worked on along with the DEC RT-11 OS. I'm seriously dating myself!Larger companies often employ (pre-sales) Systems Engineers who are teamed up with a few sales reps. We do the real selling via whiteboard, proof of concept, demos, benchmarks, etc. The sales reps handle the P.O.s and cash the commission checks. ;-) Actually, we have some pretty sharp sales reps, many of whom are former SE's. I prefer not dealing with sales issues like forecasts, giving up margin through reseller partners, etc.
I had my own 'baud rate moment' last year. ALL of our serial management ports on the ILOM service processors were historically set to 9600, 8-bit, No-parity, 1 stop bit.... forever and on everything we sold. And then it changed not long ago to 115,200 baud. I was setting up a demo and didn't even get gibberish on my screen so I swapped cables then started randomly trying different settings until it worked. The terminal in this case was just my laptop with PuTTY tools on it.... but I do recall the old VT-100 terminals from a long time ago.
Edits: 05/08/17
the engineers "taking investors off into the 'deep weeds'."
Not where you want your customers or investors to be.
Granted, when attempting to raise money, sales experience is probably more important than technical knowledge. But not for the reasons you might suspect.
Most people's experience with sales people are negative for a reason. Most sales people are BAD sales people. A mere 10% to 20% of most sales forces are responsible for more than half of all sales for most companies.
That means 80% to 90% of all sales people are not very good.
The most important skill required when dealing with investors is 'listening'. Investors have money to invest for a reason. They have been successful in their chosen field and have made a lot of it. They think they know a thing or two and they do. You will have little or no chance of pumping sand up their behinds.
But if you listen carefully, successful people will share enough of their thoughts for you to position your product/investment opportunity in a way that makes for an attractive investment.
As far as selling, the words of the late Zigg Zigler ring true to this day:
"You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want."
I don't know who said it, perhaps it's another Zigler:
"You have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion."
-Rod
My explanation or lack there of is not what I am talking about. I'd really expect someone with your background to 'get it' even without an explanation. I mean you are using this stuff everyday. You mean to say you didn't know how it worked or the difference between software and hardware.....for real?
Dynobots Audio - Music is the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth
Then I read you post and I wasn't so sure. ;-)
Strange response.
But anyway, a Renderer is a piece of hardware with software that renders music....ie Squeezelite.
That should not be confusing...I hope.
Dynobots Audio - Music is the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth
I'm not a tech writer nor have I ever played on on TV but...
This is the sentence that I found a bit confusing, being a newbie and not conversant on all of the terminology associated with the Logitech platform.
"Which means you can use it as only a server, LMS as only a renderer Squeeze or both."
Why on earth would anyone have a problem understanding a sentence like that?
Got me! ;-)
You can use Daphile as a server [LMS] -or- as a renderer [Squeezelite] or both.
You should be able to make sense of that....
Dynobots Audio - Music is the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth
Thanks!
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