* Short-lived start-up demonstrates the importance of articulating product offerings
I missed the recent Catalyst Conference, the first I’ve missed in a dozen years. But over the next few weeks I will bring up things from the conference, as reported by a number of friends who did attend. But thinking about Catalyst, I looked to see what happened there 10 years ago as, perhaps, a good topic for one of our occasional “10 years ago in this newsletter,” and I did find a gem.
Back then, the Burton Group would take a fledgling start-up under its wing and provide access to Burton’s clients (through conference sessions) as well as that all important press access. That led to one of the strangest press conferences I’ve ever attended.
Burton’s protégé organization that year was TidePoint Corporation, of Baltimore. I doubt you’ve ever heard of it. Its inaugural press release, courtesy of the “Wayback machine” said, in part:
“TidePoint Corporation, the premier provider of Business Partner Infrastructure (BPI) solutions, today announced its entrance into the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. The company’s unique offering combines the industry’s first open, component-based infrastructure with a comprehensive suite of e-business services to enable business partner collaboration. TidePoint provides Global 2000 companies, Application Service Providers (ASPs) and B2B exchanges with the infrastructure services required to extend business processes and applications to strategic partners, suppliers and customers worldwide.”
In retrospect, this would appear to be another web-services/cloud-based “solution” — except there was no such thing back in 2000. In writing about the company I compared it with Oblix (a pioneer in provisioning services, but a company more interested in marketing-speak then in talking technology) when I said (“In plain English, please,”):
“Faithful readers know I’ve lambasted Oblix on numerous occasions for being unable to simply articulate what its products are and what they do. Another company with this problem is brand-new start-up TidePoint, which attempted to lay out its vision to the press last week at the Burton Group’s Catalyst conference. Companies like Oblix and TidePoint use broad generalities (sort of like ‘mission statements’ for applications and services) and avoid nitty-gritty details as much as possible. They appear to have taken the Microsoft marketing manual (‘Where do you want to go today?’) and coupled it with the advertising techniques used for beer and cars (‘our stuff makes you sexier’) to reach a new height of puffery.”
A year later, TidePoint was no longer in business. Interestingly, I met a former TidePoint junior executive a few years ago (now with a more mundane I-know-what-they-do identity vendor) and told him that after sitting through the TidePoint press conference I still had no idea what they actually did. He confided that, even after six months at the company, he wasn’t sure what they did either!
There may have been a brash new start-up trying to showcase itself on Catalyst this year. But remember, if they can’t articulate to me what it is that they do, you shouldn’t expect them to be able to solve any of your problems.
