TOC has a unique approach to marketing and sales that revolves around changing your offering (i.e. the whole offering, not just the product or service) so that it positively effects your customers constraints. I won't go into details, but here's a real life example.
On the other hand. The personal computer industry does exactly the opposite: they create constraints that make you buy. First, the software crowd release stuff that turns your current PC into a constraint, and so you go buy a new "future-proof" PC with tonnes of disk-space, RAM, and so on, but then you realise that there is new bigger-and-better software available, so you ... and so on. Apparantly this is known as "the circle of life".
One of my favourite journalists, Robert X. Cringely, wrote an article in November 2000 called How to Avoid the Looming PC Recession. In the article he talked about the financial difficulties being experienced by the PC industry back then and he suggested a plan for saving the industry.
He argued that demand for new PCs had dropped because (a) so many people already have PCs there are less first-time buyers, and (b) new hardware is so fast that the software industry is finding it difficult to produce new software that is "Fat" enough to slow down existing PCs to force users to upgrade:
"For a couple of decades, the business worked quite simply. There were always more people who didn't use PCs than did, so there were lots of potential new users to suck in. New hardware generations were introduced every 18 months, so there were lots of old users to upgrade. Serious users would tolerate being no more than one generation behind the development curve. So everyone who had a computer got a new one every three years, and there were always lots of new users to accept hand-me-downs or generally expand the market. Well, today the new generations come every six to nine months, and for awhile it looked like the "every second generation" algorithm would hold firm. But like Reaganomics, this was an artificial market stimulation that couldn't be sustained. Hardly anybody really wants a 1.5-GHz computer, you see, because we can't, for the most part, even imagine what we'd do with such a beast. "
In otherwords, the constraint to selling more PCs was the lack of applications requiring extremely powerful PCs.
The authors solution (injection in TOC terms) was to create new applications which require high-spec PCs:
"The other big MIP-burner at this point is probably real-time video compression, but that is bandwidth bound. If only we had better network performance, it might be worth getting a new PC to really let Grandma watch the kids on her PC."
In 2000 most people were using dial-up connections and, as I discussed in my earlier post, dial-up isn't fast enough to support these types of applications. The author's solution was to improve network performance as quickly as possible: new application would soon appear reqiring faster PCs; PC Sales would go up; the world (US?) economy would keep on chugging; we would avoid recession; and then the upgrade-cycle starts again ...
My new PC - a meek 2.6 Ghz, costing all of £700s - comes with movie editing software and a DVD burner. I've just sent both Grandmas DVDs of their beautiful Grand-Daughter. My new PC runs wonderfully quickly and it didn't cost much. I doubt I'll need to upgrade it for, oh, say, 5 years. But that's what I said about the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the ...
