World Enough and Time

by Lindsey Vereen

Several years ago, perhaps in the late ı70s, a company embarked on the development of a turntable that could play vinyl records with a laser pickup. It had no needle to scratch the delicate vinyl; instead it read the grooves optically. Product development was plagued with glitches and cost overruns. I donıt think this novel turntable ever made it to your local audio store, but it was a great idea right up to the very moment that compact disc players hit the market. Thereafter it sank like a stone into the slough of missed marketing opportunities. Herein lies the essence of the time-to-market issue.

Clichı though it may be, you ignore time to market at your peril. According to a marketing guru (is that an oxymoron?), products that get to market six months late but on budget generate about 33% fewer profits over a five year span than they would have had the product shipped on schedule. Marketers have had drilled into them that 60% of a productıs return comes within the first six months, which youıll lose if youıre late to market. (Of course, this wonıt stop these same marketers from trying to get you to implement new features near the end of the development cycle, but thatıs another story.)

It should be pretty straightforward to calculate the cost of the bill of materials and the related development costs, but once you factor in time to market, the entire equation can change. What if you spend more on your processor but get your product to market six months sooner? Your parts cost is higher but so are your revenues, at least theoretically. Money spent on development tools and methodologies are justified if they help get your product out the door faster. Programming in a high-level language vs. assembly language may produce less efficient code, but it increases productivity. The ability to reuse code can potentially reduce the development time and costs. Hardware/software co-design, the subject of this monthıs cover story, is emerging as a methodology that can help you to design and verify hardware and software in parallel and to accelerate product development.

But while shipping your product sooner is a worthy goal, there are conditions. First, you have to determine when the product is ready to ship. It can be a terrible temptation to a cash-strapped company to ship before the product is ready, but itıs no fair foisting alpha versions of your product onto unsuspecting customers. Jack Ganssle looks at this critical problem in his column this month. Racing to market can also be hazardous if you arrive too soon. Sometimes products ship before customers are ready to accept them. DVD may be an example. Some people fear that HDTV may potentially be another. Itıs instructive to note that a few companies have gone under, not because they failed to deliver their product, but because they delivered it before the market was ready for it.

You wonıt run short of ways to spend money on product development. The tricky part is determining which ones will benefit you in the long run. Most frustrating is that youıll never know for sure how you would have fared had you delivered your product six months earlier or six months later. You can only speculate. Of the many potential time-to-market tools, the one that would really help is a time machine.