Fifteen years ago, a group of observers of In-
ternet-based trends wrote a collection of theses
that explored how the rise of the World Wide
Web would change the nature of business. In
the Cluetrain Manifesto, the authors declared
“markets are conversations” in which customers
and suppliers need to participate. This realisa-
tion had some important consequences for
the nature of product design and marketing,
they argued.
In the past, it was reasonable for a company to
embark on a development programme more
or less in secret to create a product with a
fixed set of features, functions and a defined
price. The market could choose to accept that
product or not but once the project was initi-
ated it was more or less set on a specific
course. Development practices evolved to max-
imise the profitability of this approach – trading
the cost of non-recurrent engineering (NRE)
for end-product manufacturing cost to produce
highly customised hardware. This would allow
the maximum pricing flexibility in the market
after launch in case the feature set did not
align entirely with customer expectations.
A decade and a half on from the release of the
first version of the Cluetrain Manifesto, we
can see the effect that the internet has had,
and the accuracy of its predictions. One of the
key findings was that “networked markets get
smart fast” and, in what they called the Clue-
train Corollary: “the level of knowledge on a
network increases as the square of the number
of users times the volume of conversation…
networked markets are not only smart markets,
but they’re also equipped to get much smarter,
much faster, than business-as-usual”.
An important – and perhaps the most impor-
tant – effect of the connectedness of the mod-
ern, internet-driven marketplace is the involve-
ment of a much wider range of customers in
product direction. Customers now drive much
of product development in a variety of ways.
A more traditional approach is the inclusion
of early-access programmes for well-known
customers who can take prototypes and provide
almost instant feedback. This approach had
its beginnings in the Agile software develop-
ment methodology in which programs could
be released for customer use well before they
are finished to ensure that the functionality
and user interfaces reflect their requirements.
An even more open approach can be seen in the
rise of pre-product funding programmes, hosted
through Internet sites such as Kickstarter or In-
diegogo. In these programmes, companies can
determine the level of interest in a product idea
and tune their offering to take into account user
feedback. In the middle, there are social-media
platforms that allow customers to send direct
feedback to companies and their engineers. Be-
cause of the increased communication among
users and potential customers, the authors of
the Cluetrain Manifesto noted another result
of the internet-mediated market: that cus-
tomers can move to another offering if their
current supplier is too slow to react. The tradi-
tional way to deal with this issue was to work
in secret. However, as ideas now travel fast,
there is no guarantee that someone else has
not had a very similar idea. The key is to move
faster than the competition, which brings tra-
ditional product-development models into
question even for embedded-systems products
where the waterfall-development model has
prevailed for decades.
The increased software content of embedded
systems and the devolution of real-time func-
tionality into the software domain – through
the use of high-speed processors, DSPs and
FPGAs – makes it possible to use Agile tech-
niques for embedded products. Because of the
real-time nature of these applications, they
need to be more feature-complete than Agile
office-IT software before they go into cus-
tomers’ hands. However, an interactive devel-
opment process means that the end-users are
able to incorporate the user-interface and func-
tionality enhancements they value the most. A
consequence of the increased need to incorpo-
rate feedback into product evolution is the re-
Speed is the key to fast-moving
embedded markets
By Mark Zack,
Digi-Key
Although market demands
have accelerated with the
growth of the internet, it is
possible to keep pace with
them through smart sourcing
strategies that take advantage
of off-the-shelf single board
computer technology.
Maximising that advantage
means choosing a supply-
chain partner best placed to
put that technology in your
hands consistently.
February 2014
28
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