Lies, Damn Lies, and Marketers

Where, precisely, is the line between marketing hype and delusions of grandeur? I've been given cause to wonder this before, most particularly late last year when the management of Symbian, makers of the OS bearing their name, made some rather extraordinary comments that you may have heard about. Not to put too fine a point on it, they said that smartphones would replace PCs--both desktops and notebooks--within five years. And just for good measure, that smartphones would make up 30% of the global phone market in the same period. That's a roughly 200,000% increase in current sales, if you didn't feel like doing the math.

Honestly, it's not like we're not accustomed to extravagant, ridiculous, sometimes even bizarre claims about the future of the tech market. I'm reminded of how much effort Microsoft put into trying to convince us that tablet PCs were going to kill laptops. But Symbian's claim had to be a new world record. I wonder, do the Symbian developers rewrite their OS code using a numeric keypad? No? Then I think you should communicate that to your bosses.

There's a classic conundrum, most often found in politics, but frequently applicable to business as well. When someone says that they can cut a budget but increase spending, or they make predictions which are clearly impossible... Are they lying, stupid, or simply crazy?

Take, for example, the extreme hype built up by Microsoft and Intel leading up to the launch of their UMPC initiative. The two companies proxies spent so much time talking about pocketable devices with 12-hour battery life priced at $500 and under that, when the real thing showed up, it was a complete flop. In one case, I had to actually go through the math with someone to convince them that I wasn't lying or mistaken when I said that a UMPC was six times the size of a Windows Mobile Pocket PC, because the marketers had been so adamant in their pushing the idea that they were the same size.

The most recent event that got me thinking in this direction was the release of the Access Linux Platform to developers. Never mind the fact that this already-delayed OS from the makers of the disastrous Cobalt doesn't have a single licensee--there's already a meme flying around about how it can and will be hugely successful in the Chinese market even if it never makes it to other shores. Company executives have expressed their desire to own 30% of the worldwide mobile operating system market by 2010. That's a ten-fold increase from the dwindling share they have now, just so you know.

Never mind the fact that the Chinese market is a meatgrinder, which routinely executes even local companies which try to do business in it. Never mind the fact that only one reputable company, Orange, has even looked at ALP seriously, and that Palm Inc. has been diligently ignoring Access ever since the PalmSource buyout. No, let's focus on the myth of the one billion strong Chinese market, a market which has never been tapped despite hundreds of billions of dollars being spent attempting to do so. Microsoft couldn't do it, not Philip Morris, Sony, nor all the companies of Hollywood, but a Japanese software company that's willing to spend $324 million dollars on a minor Chinese software company and its failing US parent is going to make the cut?

I don't know whether the marketers and their executives in these incidents honestly believe the things that they're saying. But the fact that we even have to ask the question is, frankly, kind of disturbing. On the other hand, maybe it's just the logical final stage of marketing, a task which requires you to believe that you really can reshape reality to your needs. After all, they say that it's easier to convince someone else of something when you believe it yourself.

Of course, that's also a favored saying of con artists.