A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

PLM Competition and “MEH”?

PLM Competition and “MEH”?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
11 June, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I’ve been reading SolidSmack postJim Heppelmann. Dassault Arrogant Competition. Siemens Invisible. This post made me think more about competition.  Competition is very important and this is a part of any healthy industry. So, I want to suggest a short discussion about PLM competition and modern competitive strategies. The way companies behave, can show what are their motto, believes, technological position.

Blue Ocean Strategies
If you haven’t had chance to read this book, I highly recommend you to do so. In my view, it can be considered as a modern “bible of competition”. You can find lots of interesting examples from the past and present about how companies managed their competitive strategies. The blue ocean metaphor explains the world of competition-less, where companies are focused on untapped market places, new opportunity for growths and compare it with the dominant competition strategy (red-ocean) of finding ways to cut costs and growth by taking a market share from competition.

MEH and Competition
Relax, ‘MEH’ is not a new PLM  TLA (three letter acronym) for a new super technology that will outperform all other competitors. Take a look in urban dictionary definition of “meh”. It states for “Indifference; to be used when one simply does not care.” It seems to me, MEH is going to be a new way to compete in the world when software will be available for PULL and vendors will stop PUSHING it to potential customers. I want to credit Steven Arnold KMWorld article about Google and their MEH strategy in mobile phone space. Time will show if Android will be able to outperform iPhone and RIM. This is an interesting perspective, though.

PLM Competition
PLM and associated space of CAD, CAM, CAE is not simple from a competition standpoint. In my view, the most problematic aspects of PLM-related competition are customer’s lock-in on software, sotware versions, data formats. Cost of change (or switch to a competitor’s solution) is another thing that plays as a competitive factor. On the other side, customers are starting to be tired of such competition and looking for alternatives to get the job done.

What is my short conclusion today? I think, PLM market is too focused on competition and less focused on customers. To be able to listen to customers is probably the first tool to win a competition game. PLM competition needs to learn from how to win over customers and not over competitors. This is not a simple shift. However, this is one that needs to be done to make PLM associated industry stronger.

Just my thoughts..
Best, Oleg

Share

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
8 September, 2019

There is an elephant in the room – PLM vendors business models are built for data locking. You can hear...

15 March, 2010

Content is a King. If you create valuable content in your app, you can do whatever you want. Since everybody...

28 March, 2017

For the last few years PLM vendors made a big step towards acceptance of cloud technology, SaaS application and subscription...

5 March, 2009

The development of game technologies is taking huge step forwards and is sometimes outperforming product development tools such as CAD,...

14 June, 2020

Unless you lived under the rock, you’ve heard about SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. If you will try to figure out...

4 November, 2014

I’ve been talking about future of cloud file system and CAD data trajectories the other day on my blog. It...

17 November, 2009

Recent announcements about new company PLM+ stroke me to think again about these two interesting trends – On Demand (or...

27 March, 2020

CIMdata PLM Forum – PLM Future Is Unclear And Not Only Because of COVID19 I’m slowly digesting information from the...

9 October, 2021

There is no topic in engineering and manufacturing software that can raise more debates than Part Numbers. I remember discussing...

Blogroll

To the top