RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 56

By William Van Winkle

BEING A RETIRED ENGLISH MAJOR, one of my favorite things to gripe about
is documentation. Now, I know there are significant cultural differences between East and West, and a lot can get mixed up in translation. For example, this verbatim tidbit comes from AOpen's miniPC setup manual: "If your product configuration have PS2 or USB interface .you can choice one." OK, fine. I get that a second-year English as a Second Language student probably proofed this for homework, but at least it's marginally intelligible.

What I don't get is documentation that discusses the enlightening sense of joy I'll have taking a screwdriver to my system and how a small form factor can revitalize my life like spring blossoms. Come on, you've seen this stuff, too. I'm not making it up. Even if this is conventional marketing in East Asia, somebody at some point in the supply chain between Taiwan and the Atlantic had to run this past an American and ask, "What do you think?" The inevitable incredulous guffaws in reply might offer some sort of clue that a revision was in order.

I hate that "we listen to our customers" marketing cliché. All companies say they do this, but most only pay lip service because they still believe that their way is the only right one. You have to be open to the idea that there are people out there who perceive your products differently because they're on the outside looking in, and there's no such thing as "the right perspective." More than that, you have to get off your butt and ask customers for their opinions. And I know one thing from being an English major and enduring years of pointless writing classes: Hearing that something you've done is "nice" tells you nothing. It's worse than nothing, because at best "nice" means mediocre. Your product was so bland as to not leave one detail worth recalling. At worst, "nice" means your work sucks and the other person is sparing your feelings.

Few manufacturers consistently make me feel anything like spring blossoms. One exception is ASUS. I don't want to get hyperbolic here or sound like some fawning fanboi, but I have yet to come across a bad ASUS product. Sure, there were some, like the S-Presso barebones, where you could argue that R&D may have wandered off into a weird market direction and maybe done some odd design choices to hit a price point for a perceived demographic. But I've done the Pundit barebones, optical drives, networking gear, CPU coolers, notebooks, and a fleet of motherboards, and they all just rocked. I can't recall a single mobo roundup where ASUS wasn't at least among the top three products in the group (usually the fastest), and the company usually accomplished the job with more features, a lower price, and no stability problems.

I don't mean to spotlight ASUS here because the company needs more sales. With 54 million boards shipped last year, ASUS is the world's #1 mobo vendor on volume, so it obviously doesn't need my help. Rather, I think there's a lot that resellers can learn by studying how the best in the business do business. This is the point where I get to eat a little crow and admit that there are worthy exceptions to the "we listen to our customers" rule. Some companies actually do listen, not just hear, and a handful listen extremely well.

"Everything we do is focused around the ‘N+1' concept," says David Ray, marketing manager for ASUS. "You look around, you see what everyone else is doing, what's normal for a given product in a given space. We say, ‘OK, that's N. Now, how do we provide more value? What's N+1?' And you can't just stand out. Your ‘+1' has to reflect the needs of your customers." Examples help. When you make the fastest motherboards in the business, you attract the enthusiasts and gamers who tend to overheat their components first and ask questions later. This is why you see an increasing number of ASUS performance boards coming with copper heatsink and heat pipe apparatus connecting the power circuitry, northbridge, and southbridge, eliminating one or more fans along the way. In contrast, ABIT's Dual OTES design for the same audience uses five fans—one on the northbridge, two on the shroud enveloping the MOSFETs, and another two on the canopy placed over the DIMM modules. Seriously, put a Zalman 9500 on the CPU, plant a silent 120 mm case fan somewhere, and let those ASUS heat pipes do their job.

Like "we listen to our customers," the phrase "digital home" is becoming an industry cliché—something everybody says but which conveys no clearly defined meaning. My digital home dream involves having an IPTV channel viewable anywhere from the living room plasma to my smartphone on which I can see a map showing my kids' GPS and/or cellular beacon location. (I'll be sure to look for it on the Viiv 2.0 features list.) But for many people, "digital home" just means sending multimedia around the LAN. That's the norm, N.

So what's N+1? Check out ASUS' Digital Home motherboard line and you'll find that the boards come bundled with items such as MP3-In (front and back 1/8" male audio jacks for playing portable players even while the PC is powered down), WiFi-AP Solo (integrated 802.11g client/access point that stays active when the PC is up as well as in sleep mode), and optional FrontLinker (bay-mounted card reader, USB, male miniUSB,1394a, eSATA, and an iPOD charging cable). This is smart stuff, and it's got the for-real kind of "we listen to our customers" written all over it. It's not enough to integrate wireless; what if customers want to use their cordless VoIP phones while the PC is turned off? That's +1 thinking.

Or take eight-phase cooling, which appears on some high-end ASUS boards, including coming models for Conroe. Although ASUS tries to pass this off as its own innovation, Gigabyte has been doing doing six- and eight-phase for years as part of its "dual" platform, long before "dual-core" came into vogue. Gigabyte had dual-LAN, dual-BIOS, dual-this, dual-that, and dual-power. This entailed a proprietary, LED-lit daughter board you could plug into a proprietary slot to turn it from a four-phase power mobo item into eight-phase. Year after year, I would ask Gigabyte why on Earth anyone needed dual-power. After all, if it was necessary, wouldn't you build it in rather than go through a daughter card? The reply always came back that it was to accommodate the increased power needs of high-end overclockers. Mind you, this was back in the pre-Prescott days before multi-slot graphics. The specifics—what few I could get—never added up.

Finally, here comes David Ray pitching me eight-phase power on the forthcoming ASUS Conroe board. I sighed and, once again, asked: "Dude, why on Earth does anyone need eight-phase power?"

"You don't," he said. "Not for powering your components. But you know how much juice is flowing around on boards now. Eight-phase spreads that load around more thinly and evenly so you're not hammering your power circuitry. You get better power regulation, which is better on the components, and better longevity from your power circuitry because it's not working so hard."

That's what I'm talking about. And I'll take this one step further. David Ray is a marketing guy. He's not the resident board geek. (That honor goes to Timothy Lin, who's saved my bacon many times over the years.) So the fact that a white marketing guy can whip out an answer like that on the phone tells me that ASUS is doing a good job of figuring out its messaging and communicating it effectively to the people who need to know it before the product even launches. Now, think about when you ask a Radio Shack employee a question, even something easy like why gold connectors are better or how to boil water. Different story, right?

Effective messaging within an organization is critical. If you've got employees who touch prospective customers, those people have got to be up to speed. I went into a Mac Store for the first time the other day and started asking Boot Camp (the split Mac OS/Windows configuration enabled through the virtualization technology in Intel's Core Duo chip) questions to a random sales guy in the showroom. Not only could he answer my questions, without being asked he led me to a Powerbook and started demonstrating the answers to me. I couldn't stump him until we dug into Display Properties in the XP Control Panel. And this guy wasn't even one of the "gurus" supposedly on location in each store. Never in my life have I felt the slightest urge to own a Mac, and I walked out of that store wanting one. That's the power of effective messaging.

"ASUS didn't become the most popular motherboard choice for customers by a 2 to 1 margin over our nearest competitor by accident," says Ray. "For us, customer input is an indispensable part of the product development process. When enough customers told us they needed a better heat solution that was also quieter, we became the innovator and the leader in fanless board cooling with such innovations as StackCool2, which spreads heat out of the back of the motherboard, and heat pipe technology. When they complained about the difficulty of plugging in front panel wires onto a tiny space on the motherboard, we developed a Q Connector, which allows system builders to make the connections to a removable connecting part and then plug that part into the motherboard. Our PM and R&D teams meet all the time to discuss how we can make every product better."

Now, I know that most system builders don't have extreme temperature chambers to test their systems. Most shops' idea of validation is pre-loading an application and running a burn-in app for 72—OK, maybe 7.2—hours. You can't afford on-site case studies of end-user lifestyles, development of custom middleware, or the like.

But you can talk to your customers, really listen to them, and go find the products that address their needs. This sounds obvious, but very, very few people actually do a decent job of it. And consider this: ASUS is almost never the cheapest brand. It's not extortionate, only competitive with extra value-adds to sweeten the deal. An honest conversation with buyers will reveal that the majority care more about utility and features than price. You need to listen, think, be creative in devising your +1 factor, and then implement it smartly.

"The best thing resellers can do is measure how well they are satisfying their customers' needs, and that takes communication," says Ray. "There is a Chinese saying that among any three people, one will be the Buddha (teacher). Let your customers teach you."