Steve Ballmer's presentation to financial analysts this Thursday deserves a special place in the business wing of the Museum of FUBAR. After months of Apple iPad commanding the attention of, oh, say, the world, here's the best response that Ballmer had. 

Now, we've got some other competitive actions coming back, and we'll talk about slates and tablets and blah, blah, blah, blah ....

Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we've got to make things happen with Windows 7 on slates. And we are in the process of doing that as we speak. We're working with our hardware partners, we're tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs that they're bringing them to market. And, yeah, you're going to get a lot of cacophony. There will be people who do things with other operating systems. But we've got the application base, we've got the user familiarity. We've got everything on our side if we do things really right.

Today's a very exciting day for me. As you know, I'm a member of a team of Forrester analysts who write research specifically for product marketers and product managers in the tech industry. A few weeks ago, we launched a community for product marketers and product managers. Now, we're bringing those two activities together by including our PM community in every stage of a research project. Plus, we're using an Agile approach. And you're all invited.

(Role-based research. The voice of the customer, expressed loudly and regularly through social media. Agile as the vehicle for applying what customers say to the product we're developing, in the most rapid and substantive way possible. I guess we do read our own research.)

What's The Topic?
We've yet to meet a product marketer or product manager who isn't interested in thought leadership, given its attractiveness and elusiveness. Gaining recognition as a thought leader is only the first step. Having achieved that exalted status, how do vendors convert thought leadership into tangible business benefits?

For our first venture into this new research approach, thought leadership was an easy choice of topic: important, popular, practical, and manageable.

Where Does The Community Fit In?
The community has a bigger role to play in this project than just suggesting a topic. We need your suggestions and feedback throughout the entire research process, from inception to publication. For example, before doing the primary research, we'll draft a list of interview questions. Since thought leadership has no end of interesting aspects, we want to make sure that the questions we ask go straight to the issues that matter most to product marketers and product managers. Here are but a few examples:

In the tech industry, the earlier in the innovation process a developer works, the greater the prestige. Lower in the status hierarchy are developers who work on performance and scalability issues, build integrations with other systems, handle security issues, and (heaven forfend!) help the QA team set up test environments. 

Of course, the customer has a much different set of priorities. Sure, new products and features are interesting, but their value is moot if the technology doesn't work. How many concurrent users can the system bear before it keels over? Are the big security holes plugged? Has anyone else run version 7.0.1.3 on Ubuntu 10.04? These questions determine whether a customer buys your product and how likely they are to remain a customer after they've tried to deploy it.

Remember The D In R&D
Some of the larger technology companies have decided to make a serious investment in fixing the problem. While sensitivity training might help some development teams better appreciate the contributions of some of their members ("Looks like the performance guy needs a hug!"), there's no replacement for a well-staffed, well-equipped, dedicated effort to ensuring that the technology works as advertised. Or, just as importantly, doesn't work as advertised, so that the customer knows what sort of configurations and use cases to avoid.

In the technology industry, we use the term thought leader far too loosely. This mistake is not just semantic, since technology vendors want to use thought leadership to achieve business results.

Big vendors like IBM, SAP, and Microsoft want you to believe that they are thought leaders, in spite of their size and age. Yes, we may bestride the world like a colossus, but, when need be, we can pick up our feet and run in the direction that the market is headed. Small vendors have the opposite problem. Sure, they may be nimble, and they may have Big New Ideas that anticipate the future of their markets. But can you rely on them to execute? And no matter how good your ideas might be, how do you get anyone to pay attention to them if no one has heard of you before?

If you're not convincing, you're not a thought leader. Therefore, thought leadership must be superior to the unconvincing claims that appear on vendor Web sites, where practically everyone claims to be the leading company in blahblahblah. (If everyone's a leader, then who are the followers?) Inserting the word thought into these elevator pitches doesn't convert them into magical words of power.