discussUC

Authors: Julia White

Almost everyone knows the Toshiba brand, but you might not know that they recently switched from Lotus Notes to Exchange and SharePoint.   Toshiba has 130,000 employees worldwide and is a global leader in electronics manufacturing.  Their story is very typical of large, global companies that have switched from...

Authors: Julia White

A year ago, Microsoft and HP undertook a challenge to provide our customers with solutions to deliver faster business results.  Our approach would be to create new appliances for key IT workloads, including virtualization and management, business intelligence, and email.  We called this partnership...

Authors: Avaya Insights

So, this week is Interop, Las Vegas.  "Geeks Go Gambling?"  That, in a way, is the subtitle to this blog.  The answer is...not really.  Let me explain.

Engineers are notoriously analytical.  About everything.  Just ask their spouses.  And when it comes to hosting a bunch of engineers...

It has been a few weeks since the Cisco Cius announcement and I have now had some time to reflect on it and talk to some of my IT friends and I have come to wonder if the product is DOA.....stay with me for this.

I have come to the conclusion that Cius is a great example of a concept that has been implemented in a way that ensures "Death in the Middle".

Death in the Middle refers to products that find themselves sandwiched between a higher value/higher price product and a lower vale/price product or in some other way caught between the extremes. In virtually all cases, products in the middle are doomed as buyers tend to cluster at the poles of the buying spectrum; they either buy for low price/capability or for maximum capability regardless of price. Innumerable marketing and business analysis have shown this to be true. If the market cannot be redefined so the product in the middle is in a different market it dies.....

With Cius, Cisco has created a product that finds itself squarely in the middle of the hand-held business device spectrum. By choosing a size of 7 inches, the Cius device is neither a pocket-able all the time device like the iPhone nor is it a reasonable carry type tablet. The following illustrates the conundrum of being in the middle in the device marketplace.

As can be clearly seen, the combination of screen size and device size lead to a clear segmentation that creates the "Death in the Middle". In screen size, screens 7" and smaller are not large enough to do multi-party video, have true windowing, enable text reading for page views of forms or documents. They also will not enable desktop virtualization in a meaningful way as they are just too small to replicate in any way the experience on a 15-25" monitor. To see this effect, using a cut out window of paper will show how little of your PC screen can be seen at 7 inches. It is critical to remember that usable screen is the square of the diagonal measure, so a screen with 9.5" has twice the area of a 7" screen. This is critical as displaying multi-party video or seeing real response expressions in video requires a minimum size. Note that all of the iPhone video screens shown are a single headshot......conversely, any screen larger than about 4" precludes the device from being small enough to fit into a pocket easily. So, devices with both mid and large size screens are relegated to being carried as a hand-held all the time.

In this combination of factors lies the challenge that the Cius will face in the market; it is too large to be a reasonable pocket-able device and its' 7' screen is too small for either serious video or business applications. So Cisco has created in Cius a superb example of a product that will die in the middle.

So in the end "See-Us" is a near miss of real value and will in fact be DOA.