About three months ago, this team of seasoned marketing professionals with a host of major Silicon Valley names on their resumes decided to go into the business of building software. Acutely aware of the mistakes made by all software vendors, they began the process by gaining a deep understanding of customers and their needs.

An extensive market research process was commissioned and despite its considerable expense and time consuming nature, gained a set of key important conclusions. These can be summarized by saying that "Customers of software vendors spend a lot of money buying [software] products that are hard to compare, difficult to install, never completely fulfill their original business requirement and incur additional cost on an ongoing basis to keep working and current. The actual implementation is rarely ever equal to the idealistic software experience that is promised in the marketing literature and tradeshow demonstrations and the product is generally a disappointment to the business."

Armed with this insight, the team set about creating the Obsequential Software Development Methodology (OSDM), an innovative new business process for software development, massively re-engineered to remove the aspects of the software product experience that customers find disappointing. This insight is at the heart of how Obsequential products will always provide ultimate customer satisfaction.

The Obsequential Software Development Methodology (ODSM) comprises 5 key important principles. It is used exclusively in the development and maintenance cycle of all products and has resulted in an ultra-rapid development life cycle and results in a revolutionary absence of software bugs.

The greatest pain point experienced by customers is the gap between promised product functionality and actual implemented functionality available in the installed product. Therefore the first principle is to remove any actual implemented functionality. By removing this gap, we have created a promise of no installed product that can never disappoint. Therefore all Obsequential products are only delivered in MS Powerpoint slideware, marketecture diagrams and product datasheets.

There is a constant battle between customers and vendors with regard to upgrades: overall backward compatibility; the ability to implement patches, customizations and upgrades; the business disruption caused during the upgrade process; and the additional ongoing cost. To address this issue, all Obsequential customers will receive a 100% custom designed upgrade path that has been crafted to address each and every upgrade issue and this will be delivered in the same MS Powerpoint1 slideware marketecture diagrams and product datasheets as the original product.

Obsequential will always use the current shipping versions of MS Powerpoint / MS Word and will rely on Microsoft to ensure backward compatibility.

Customers always feel cheated in paying hefty ongoing maintenance costs, particularly as much troubleshooting is undertaken internally or by expensive consultants. Obsequential has taken a no-frills approach to maintenance and support by eliminating it completely - no shipping product, no need for support. This frees the customer up to go to the provider of their hardware or to join newsgroups and online communities to obtain the most effective and timely support.

We have observed yet another pain point in the enterprise software experience – the sales cycle. Not only is the customer faced with an over-attentive salesforce, but the vendor is also burdened with a disproportionate cost base in supporting a group of highly compensated sales professionals. The removal of the Sales force means that customers will be able to download and purchase products directly from our online store and will be able to benefit from our reduced operating costs. Additionally customers will be able to continue with managing their critical operations instead of attending lengthy and time consuming presentations and meetings.

As vendors end-of-life software products, this causes customers to go through the upgrade or suffer dilemma, generally a lose-lose situation for all parties. Zero-Time Obsolescence is a direct result of OSDM Principles 1 and 3 and means that there is an expected lifetime of zero days for any product. Customers are no longer faced with a dilemma as to how long to continue with an obsolete and therefore unsupported product and can rapidly move on to making the next purchase decision.

The OSDM principles allow Obsequential to operate with an ultra-lean core operating team comprising only the finance, marketing and strategy functions.

Colin Dover graduated magna cum laude from the School of Hard Knocks in Rhode Island and he entered the software industry over a decade ago after slipping on a glace cherry. He joins Obsequential after ten years of out-of-body contemplation and self-analysis from which he brings a wealth of inner-customer empathy and a healthy contempt for the people outside of himself. He has a keen eye for ineffective people and is able to confidently set them on the correct path using only his fists. Colin is currently on sabbatical at a farm in Chihuahua where he is indexing his considerable collection of stoner rock albums, he is on trajectory to re-enter society sometime soon.

Gam Dias has spent 8 weeks working in high tech marketing in Silicon Valley. Prior to that he spent 20 years as a work experience student in various IT departments, software product development groups and consulting organizations in Europe and North America. He is still learning to read and write, but lectures regularly on marketing ineffectiveness at the Great Bear Coffee Company in Los Gatos, CA. He plans to cycle around the block at the weekend.

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