The Law of the Opposite

If you're a CEO of a major corporation, you may have more to blog about than your Mom's latest tatoo. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz demonstrates this in his blog, where a recent posting includes these nuggets:

Sun's systems are so energy efficient that PG&E offers rebates for Sun's systems in California, and

'Whoever said 'tape is dead' has never spoken to a customer that produces a terabyte of data every couple of minutes.

In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout call it 'the law of the opposite.' You define yourself by defining the market leader, hanging the albatross of its greatest vulnerability around its neck, and saying, in effect, 'You know you don't like that. Well, we're the alternative to that.' When Listerine was the leading mouthwash, Scope used the phrase 'medicine breath' to tag its competitor and present itself as the one alternative to 'medicine breath' mouthwash. But sometimes the competition isn't a company or product, but a technology. And so we see Sun's software honcho Rich Green talking about the unnecessary complexity of service oriented architectures (SOA). And the press release from Mulesource is singing a similar-sounding tune: 'Typically, when you turn to a proprietary vendor for integration, they try to push a complex SOA / ESB / WS-* stack at you that costs big money and is tremendously complex...' Service oriented architectures: the Dennis Hastert of enterprise development?

Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:54 PM  Permalink