Gates’ Exit Out the Door
The Marketing Consigliere cursed Bill Gates before he ever knew he existed. His first job out of college was with Mayflower Moving. (How he got from working in trucking industry to working in the Internet industry is simple – they’re both transportation related. One is with packages while one is with packets – you must deliver them both on time without dropping them.) Or you could think he got a job with his uncle Dominic’s local Teamster union… take your pick.
In the warehouse they stored computer parts for IBM – this was 1984, the dawn of the PC age. And he remembers having to fulfill parts orders to deliver to the nearby IBM facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for assembly. Part of the parts order included the shrink-wrapped DOS boxes, with their funny miniature 3-ring binder and five-inch floppies.
It always seemed like they would call an order in at the end of the day, just when he was about to wind down and go home. So he didn’t know what DOS was an acronym for but he knew it meant it was a pain in the you-know-what.
Fast forward almost 25 years later… Bill gates, the mastermind behind DOS and the rise of Microsoft, is stepping down from his daily responsibilities at the software giant. Actually, The Marketing Consigliere harbors no resentment to him at all but does chuckle at the umbrage many techies take to Bill’s mere existence and the success of his leadership.
His departure really does signify the end of an era. Bill and Microsoft have dominated the computer, but even with Internet Explorer, the man and company have not dominated the Internet. There is a new era with new players and will prove to be even more amazing than the era closing with Bill’s new direction.
This is the true beginning of a net-centric world, with marketers discovering more and more the power that data brings to the enterprise. While other disciplines such as finance, operations, manufacturing and even sales have been automated and networked, marketing is finally getting its day in the sun.
What The Marketing Consigliere calls C4ISR Marketing is the ability to leverage the complete power of data and internetworking to deliver what the customer needs; although it has taken a long time to reach this ability, the marketing world sometimes doesn’t seem quite ready for it. Well, Bill is out of the limelight and now the real show begins…