begin rant
Solution selling is garbage… the entire premise that links the occasionally true assertion that “people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to business problems” with the notion that you can pre-package solutions to those business problems and build a marketing campaign around them is absurd. People are the cause of the aforementioned business problem, so while many businesses face similar challenges to their success, you will always have to re-tailor the “productized solution” to the political environment of the customer – there are no plastic people; and re-tailoring a cookie cutter design is often more work than starting from scratch and applying the immediate solution with a good measure of experiential knowledge about how you have previously solved similar problems.
The ability to navigate that landscape while simultaneously performing various feats of technological magic isn’t a business process, it is the result of smart people working hard in the face of many obstacles.
Sales gurus who dream up this excrement are philosophical and psychological infants and I’m offended that I’m obliged to lower myself to their level because someone who is paid orders of magnitude more than I am to sit behind a desk has read a new “business management” book.
More offensive yet is the idea that a marketing campaign can become the foundational ethic of an entire sales organization, or that a sales organization so enthralled can influence the direction of a company’s product to chase a fad – which itself is created by marketing.
Yes, somewhere inside every blasphemous rumor and mythological whisper is a kernel of truth but the whole virtualization/cloud computing hyperbolic orgy has completely overstayed it’s welcome and the folks still enthusiastically banging that particular drum are like that guy who still hangs around trying to pick-up high school girls years after he graduated; funny when it’s Matty McConaughey, skeezy when it’s not.
Virtualization solves some particular problems around cloud computing, and cloud computing solves some particular problems for specific kinds of technology users, but neither is going to make the Internet better or bring about a revolution in Information Utility or cure cancer or solve world hunger or global warming because they are just tools, and the problem with all tools is this:
If you aren’t smart enough to understand how to solve the problems they solve without them, they aren’t going to solve the problems for you; tools only make hard things easier, they don’t make the hard things cease to exist or make you suddenly more adept at seeing solutions to complex problems.
If you think that living in a world surrounded by black boxes that do your complex reasoning for you because you can’t do it for yourself, please don’t ask me to set up the black boxes for you.
end rant