Notion Ink - Paper Tiger Company & CEO / Maybe mine should be the, ahem, Notion Ink Blog?

You know, the CEO of Notion Ink not so long ago said he'd blog every week. That didn't happen. So he said "every 2 weeks!", that didn't happen as well. It's been 6 weeks since the last post and even the ardent fans are getting a bit restless waiting for his pearls of wisdom.

But I'm pretty consistent - perhaps I'm the Only Notion Ink Blog that's consistent! Most of the blogging  fans have long vanished and the company CEO doesn't do it much either. That leaves the burden on yours truly, jksaur. And I intend to hog the limelight if you will please allow me. Maybe Notion Ink should simply call mine the official Notion Ink Blog, at least my blog is more true than the official one, don't you think?

So, what was I going to say? That Notion Ink is a great example of a paper tiger company. Great on paper (or blog) but terrible in reality. Most buyers buy the dream and deal with a nightmare, and some will keep singing his praise and vision and Tegra 4 with root capability and 9000 ports while forgetting that a company with no clue about its target market cannot survive.

Let's just break down the operations of a typical small consumer electronics company, shall we? Nothing fancy. From ideation/inception all the way to customer service. So, the basic steps (not necessarily in the exact sequence)

Ideation->R&D->Strategy->Supply chain->Production & Quality Control->Marketing->Distribution->Product Support->Reverse Logistics (customer returns etc.)

Now we'll see where they did well. Most reasonably successful companies tend to most of these steps quite well, with spikes (strong performance) in some areas and improvement points in some other. How does NI fare?

Ideation->Pretty good

R&D->Mediocre - when you consider choices and performances of various components

Strategy -> Disaster. They have absolutely no clue what the their target segment is or what their clear value proposition is (well, if you don't know your customers you don't know what your proposition is either...)

Supply chain->Bad but perhaps got a bit better by PO3

Production & Quality Control->Terrible, absolutely terrible quality control

Marketing->Used to be good. Now bad. Keep in mind their only marketing in the blog and involvement of media in some interviews. And you'll all agree that there's no marketing anymore.

Distribution->No distribution except an average site

Product Support->Terrible, awful

Reverse Logistics->Disaster

So, the 2 areas where they did OK was ideation - which is lot of paper and some design and Marketing - which is all words. Everything else? Argh. So - it is a great paper tiger.

Don't also forget that their development capability is "incompetency" - from the really bad software quality to the fact that if they weren't propped up by TabletRoms they'd be dead by now. Which brings me to the first cartoon for this site! Enjoy my Leonardo Da Vinci like artistic capability!



 

So, like all of you I await the next blog post on the official blog, which will hopefully prove me wrong by not being about "research on shades of gray on the left lower quadrant of the Adam when in 70% brightness under fluorescence light conditions and how it will affect the 4th generation Adam" (and I kid you not that there will be blog responses to that too saying "Oh thank you Rohan for posting something! You are a visionary!")

You'll hear from me again soon

Warm Regards, (about 40C)

jksaur