One of the most popular questions clients ask me is, “When will tablets be used for productivity, rather than just consumption?” My answer: They already are, but in different ways than we have come to expect from the PC era. As I discuss in a new Forrester report, tablets, smartphones, and future devices like wearables are tools of a new era of post-PC productivity.

Combining the native capabilities of post-PC devices with cloud connectivity yields powerful new productivity scenarios that weren’t available in the PC era, such as:

• On-screen, in-person presentations. With a laptop, the screen is a wall that divides participants; tablets enable participants to share a screen, and their lightweight, instant-on form factor makes spontaneous presentations using apps like Slideshark possible in hallways or trade show floors — not just conference rooms.
• Scanning, processing, and sharing from a single, portable device. The combination of a high-quality camera combined with the ability to annotate and share documents condenses document workflow, using apps like DocScanner and PaperPort by Nuance Communications.
• Remote, anywhere document access, editing, and sync. Before its acquisition by Google, Quickoffice generated $30 million in revenue in 2011 with products that allow users to remotely access, search, edit, sync, and share documents across devices, platforms, and cloud services.

It’s a beautiful sunny day here in England, the first snowdrops have appeared in my garden and at least one of my pet hens has restarted laying – yes, Spring is on the way. Meanwhile, in the US the main harbinger of the changing season is the migration of baseball teams to Florida and Arizona for their annual pre-season ritual known as ‘Spring Training’. In the software sourcing world, the rites of Spring often include major negotiations with Oracle and Microsoft ahead of their fiscal year ends of May and June respectively. That’s why this is a perfect time of year to get some spring training of your own, at one of our ever-popular Microsoft Negotiation workshops.¹ Anyone considering a major purchase or renewal with the Redmond Sluggers between now and the World Series should come along to Amsterdam on February 16 or Dallas on March 2 to hear why they may have extra leverage this year, and how to use it to get the best possible deal.

Microsoft had very high sales revenue for its December quarter, particularly the business division, but that didn’t come from the multi-year Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Software Assurance (SA) deals that the direct sales teams need. Microsoft’s revenue boost came from one-off purchases of its just-released Office 2010 product through its retail and small business programs. EA/ SA deals would initially appear in the accounts as unearned revenue in the balance sheet, and that was at the same level as two years earlier.² So these results are consistent with our research that predicts that Microsoft’s direct sales teams will struggle to meet their tough EA bookings targets this year, and that will strengthen prospective buyers’ negotiating position.

We can’t promise warm weather or adoring fans, but our spring training session will help you with:

Congratulations, product marketers: You've been a critical part of the innovation process.

Sorry to break it to you, product marketers: On average, technology vendors stink at the phase of innovation where you play the biggest part.

Translating The Nouns But Not The Verbs
By no means are product marketers per se to blame for this outcome. Until recently, the technology industry has been slow to realize how innovation works. Vendors tacitly assumed that there were two separate processes at work, one that brought new products and services to market and another that convinced people to buy and use them.

At the boundary between product management and product marketing (as clearly as you can draw one), a hand-off occurred where one process ended and another began. The hand-off created predictable problems, in the same fashion as phone companies that assign one team for turning off phone service at your old location and a second team for turning it on at your new one.

One of the most painful consequences is fragmented, incomplete, and inaccurate information about a topic of interest to everyone: adoption. Every person in a tech company depends on some understanding of the who, what, why, when, and how of adoption, from the engineer who builds the technology, to the marketer who describes it to a general audience, to the salesperson who tries to persuade specific people to buy it. With rare exceptions, the engineer, marketer, and salesperson do not share the same mental image.

Learning about customers is hard, and everyone has deadlines to meet. Meanwhile, engineers, marketers, and salespeople can achieve a gestalt on a different topic: the technology's capabilities. For product marketers, product-centric marketing content is a natural result.