Fear, uncertainity and doubt.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative (and vague) information on a competitor's product. The term originated to describe misinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry and has since been used more broadly. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.
Please see below an example of the kind of FUD you may find being alleged by a typical dinosaur PC based system supplier / competitor (most of whom are frantically scrabbling to provide an ASP solution and trying to justify to their Board the trashing of previous development work).
As a rule, restaurantdiary.com™ never disparages competitor products but sometimes we come across competitors with lower ethics than ourselves (we have recently encountered this in open tender with three different competing suppliers - so we are mildly amused) - a typical exchange might be as follows:-
Competitor - "We believe that the only way to deliver reliable, fast, efficient, secure, easy to use applications is by delivering them as Windows desktop applications."
Our Response - Desktop applications have a tendency to crash and fall over - they are based on desktop operating software, which can suffer all sorts of problems. restaurantdiary.com™ is based on industrial strength server operating and database software.
restaurantdiary.com™ has the best functionality of any restaurant table management system we have seen. It has been specified from the ground up by front of house operators who understand the processes required to deliver good food and service and the need to maximise revenue at times of peak demand. It has not been designed by software developers who do not understand the flow through a restaurant from back to front of house nor how the food gets to the table.
Competitor - "restaurantDiary.com™ is a web-based ASP application delivered entirely over the web - lose your web connection and your diary's dead."
Rubbish, restaurantdiary.com™ can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.
The writer can demonstrate use via Bluetooth and a Blackberry! It is a bit slow but it works.
It can also work over a standard 56k dial up account - not recommended.
Has this guy not heard of 3G data cards as sold by Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile? These are now at broadband speed and very reliable.
Broadband services are constantly evolving - especially the download speed service providers offer. You cannot say the same for your PC unless you want to invest in another £1,000 every 6 months to keep your network up to date.
restaurantdiary.com™ takes backups of all forward bookings on any machine it is being accessed from. This provides an HTML print out of all forward bookings.
Competitor - Being a web application you share restaurantDiary.com™ with all the other restaurantDiary.com™ users, and as all broadband users share their Internet connections too, the more people who are sharing the slower everything becomes. The shared approach means restaurantDiary.com™ can deliver their services very cheaply, but when things get busy it means that at best their users can suffer slow and irritating performance, or at worst their diaries become unusable, or even inaccessible. Users soon get fed up waiting for a web page to load when they are busy planning a session or trying to seat a guest in real time!
It is not cheap but it is value for money. It's called economies of scale. If we add lots of users, we add more hardware and everyone gets the benefit. It's that simple.
restaurantdiary.com™ has never lost a customer through problems with speed of service. It is definitely preferable that each user accessing restaurantdiary.com™ has bandwidth equivalent to basic broadband speed - this is axiomatic for any access of the Internet. If you have one point of access, 512k will suffice - if you have 4 connected users accessing one connection it is preferable to have 2 megabytes - it’s not rocket science and the above is a blinding statement of the obvious.
Because restaurantdiary.com™ system is delivered over the web and concurrent use is of paramount importance we have employed modern "best of breed" software and code in our programming to ensure that concurrent use and lack of speed would never be a problem. We would not have a scaleable business model if our system had not been based on these parameters from the get go. We would argue that we will have spent approximately 100 times as much time developing this area of our system as has been spent on a typical dinosaur PC system. It is axiomatic that ours works and that when you start trying to develop a typical dinosaur PC system for concurrent use it falls over, slows up and then grinds to a halt. We know - we have tried 99% of such systems and it was frustration with them that lead to the inception of restaurantdiary.com™.
Also, using real time web links with typical dinosaur PC systems is most emphatically not a good idea because they were never designed with this in mind.
It is very difficult and costly to access dinosaur PC systems remotely - and you should basically just forget "real time".
Competitor - A typical dinosaur PC system is a desktop application that runs physically in your restaurant so always runs at full speed (You are having a laugh!) which enables us to deliver a "real time" system that is far more interactive, more sophisticated, richer, faster, and easier to use than any web application. Don't take our word for it though - Microsoft don't deliver their world-class Office applications (Word, Excel etc) as web-based applications - they are all desktop applications as they want their users to have the richest possible usage experience..
Lies! Lies! Damned Lies!
It is Microsoft’s intent to STOP selling Office as a PC based product within the next 2 years and in fact they are already delivering Office products as ASP’s on a subscription basis – the exact same business model as used by restaurantdiary.com™
See this article and in particular, note that they have made their flagship customer relationship management tool a web based application.
The real proof is at http://officelive.microsoft.com/
Competitor - Critical systems like EPOS systems have never been delivered as web-applications - why should your Table Reservations suffer such limitations? With EPOS and Table Reservations running side by side in a restaurant it even becomes possible to integrate them, which is not possible with a web-only application.
This is unadulterated nonsense. There are many examples of EPOS systems based on web technology - please refer to http://www.2e-pos.com/ for one example.
Douglas Rice of the Hotel Technology Networking Group considers that ALL hotel PMS systems will be delivered as ASP’s within the next 2 to 5 years - I know because he told me personally.
There is actually an industry standard regarding XML data feeds so that different supplier system ASP’s can communicate seamlessly with each other. The whole thrust of the hotel reservation technology advance is towards ASP’s. The dinosaur PC systems will soon be very old and very redundant technology.
We are currently working with Aloha (Radiant Corporation of America), Posera, Springer Miller and 2e-volve to look at practical ways to integrate our systems. Some of these suppliers offer PC based and/or ASP based products - they do not seem to see the problems this supplier is keen to highlight.
Competitor - It’s also worth noting that restaurantDiary.com™ houses all of your data centrally on the Internet where it is prey to hackers, viruses, denial of service attacks, snooping, and other malicious web practices.
Any PC is open to hackers, especially those that aren't protected by expensive and largely ineffective virus software. restaurantdiary.com™ has its own dedicated hardware firewall to protect it from any threat.
Competitor - Are you sure you want your critical business information to exist in this space? Even the banks struggle to protect their data and they have the most sophisticated security yet devised. A typical dinosaur PC system houses your data in a machine within your restaurant giving you physical control over who can access it.
I would reply to this by asking..."What happens when your PC or hard drive fails?" Having the diary physically housed on a single machine in a restaurant is much less reliable. Any part of the machine could quite simply break - including the drive holding all the booking data and note that this is a lot more likely to happen to a standalone machine in a restaurant than on our enterprise quality server. If that happened with restaurantdiary.com™, you would just plug in a new one and hop along to www.restaurantdiary.com. If that happened with a desktop application, you'd need to plug the new machine in, get the application reinstalled, get the data restored etc. Along the same lines, when we push out feature upgrades everyone immediately gets the benefit of them.
In every way, restaurantdiary.com™ is much more secure because it is personally managed by a highly trained team, secured by a hardware firewall, and runs a server class operating system on its servers. The machines physically have highly reliable server quality drives, which are mirrored and regularly backed up, with the tapes being taken off site. Our power supplies are redundant as are the cooling and networking systems. In terms of actual physical security, the machines are in a network rack cage in a data centre, access to which is controlled by good old fashioned security guards.
Competitor - A typical dinosaur PC system is produced by a team of Microsoft Certified Professionals who are committed to producing the best-of-breed product for Table Reservations, building on XX years of delivering solutions to the hospitality industry.
Why have these experts not evolved to using the latest best-of-breed Microsoft technology such as .ASP (restaurantdiary.com™) or ASP.NET? They are living in the past.
top
|
