I’m in Dallas, TX for the next few days to attend Siemens PLM Connection 2015 conference. Teamcenter is one of the oldest brands in PLM software and I’m looking forward to learn more about that. One of the things that concerning me in PLM industry is a lack of differentiations. If you remember, my post few weeks ago – PLM and VC firms are facing the same problems – lack of differentiation. On my way to Dallas, I downloaded Siemens PLM Connection agenda here. What surprised me is that it wasn’t overloaded with modern buzzwords. Maybe it is just old fashion. Who knows… I’m still not sure if I like it or not. But sometimes, too many buzzwords are creating bad feeling before the event. You probably remember my blog post following CIMdata forum in Ann Arbor – Cloud is not the way to re-think PLM. Then what?
In my view, we are paying to much attention to trends and the opportunities behind applying buzzwords to describe what we do. Earlier today, I was listening to This week in Startups video with Peter Thiel. The video is a bit long and probably not relevant in all parts for PLM community. However, one part, which is related to “trends and buzzwords” is must see to every person involved in PLM development.
The passage that caught my attention was about buzzwords and trends. Here are notes from the video- you can see them here.
Peter is always skeptical of sectors and trends.People always ask him what trends he sees for the future, and he never likes the question because he is not a prophet and doesn’t think the future is fixed in that sort of way. All trends are overrated. For example – healthcare, IT, location software, etc – these are all somewhat overrated.SaaS is pretty badly overrated. And if you hear the words big data and cloud computing you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. Conversely, the things that are underrated are the things that have no buzzwords and don’t fit in to any pre-existing categories. Here is the statement where proliferation of buzzwords is going to extreme – “I’m building a mobile platform for SaaS enterprises to do big data in the cloud.
What is my conclusion? We need to remove buzzwords from the lexicon of PLM applications. Many of the things PLM industry does is badly and deeply engaged with TLAs and buzzwords. I can see in the future engineering and manufacturing software without buzzword thinking about differentiations. Companies that will be able to runaway from buzzwords, will be winning future PLM competition game. It will probably include removing of “PLM” buzzword too. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
