Monday, April 4, 2011

Dog Food Shopping

If you Google on “dogfooding” you can find out about one of the concepts in Hi-Tech Industry called the Dog Food effect. The idea is that you have to use your own products so you can tell your customers that you know what they are going through because you eat your own dog food, so to speak. The idea is you should be familiar with your own product, something like an updated version of“Practice What You Preach”.


I first heard of this concept when Microsoft was found to be running linux servers and they had to promise to stop the same way Intel can’t run any computers with AMD chips and the Pepsi delivery man can’t be caught drinking Coke. It makes sense up to a point and then it starts to hurt more than it’s worth and people end up cheating to sneak their i-Pad in the door. It’s good to shop local when you can but it’s still OK to go Mall once in a while.


Another related idea is to go “Shopping” for your own product to experience what your users have to go through when they shop for your stuff. When I was taking support calls the shopping amounted to our bosses calling in to us as if they were customers to see how we handled their complaints.


I remember one of these incidents when I was taking support calls for Intel modems where the customer gave the standard complaint about the modems being hard to use and I gave the standard response about having to make system configuration changes and then the guy got mad. I kept my cool but he was angry and demanded a picture of my boss. It seemed like an unusual request but I said I would make the report and then he asked for a picture of the boss with his dog and that was the moment when I should have recognized the joke but they could have kept going asking for pictures of the cat and the pet bird and the even the dentist and I would have kept going along with the joke all day long.


The same concept works with your competitors in the business world where you want to go buy their product and then call their tech support. You should know the look and feel of the other products in your space so you can honestly point out the differences. Similarly you should use equipment from the company you are trying to sell to, we found out the hard way when HP told us we would get no more business until our Sales department switched from IBM to HP laptops. They didn’t like us going to their building with the competitors laptops.


The whole concept of having to eat your own dog food reminds me of the free trade concept of “Buy American” where it sounds alot easier than it is to actually do in reality. My company tries to buy products with our chips but it is impossible to operate with only our own stuff. Besides, I tried eating the dog food when I was a kid and while it wasn’t that bad, I still wouldn’t recommend it as the only diet option.

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