Ploughing a lone furrow

It occurred to me that a number of the things we sell have an unusual, and totally accidental, common theme. They are made by companies that are not afraid of doing things differently, companies that are prepared to look at things fom a different angle, to plough a lone furrow.

I’m a big fan of italian motorbikes, and in particular of a small Bologna based company called Moto Morini. Morini has a long and distinguished history dating back to 1937. As a tiny company they have always had a very focussed kind of product that bears the distinctive mark of the designer. They have never been afraid to do things there own way, even if this flies in the face of the commonly accepted norm. For example, in the early 1960s bike racing was dominated by Japanese four cylinder racers, chiefly from the all conquering Honda. Never short of ambition, and with virtually no money, in 1963 Morini decided to take them on, with an apparently archaic single cylinder design. Sadly, as this is a true story, the fairytale ending never happened and Honda actually won the championship, but only by 2 points and in very odd circumstances. The point is that Morini had the confidence to trust in what they knew, to build a very focussed product and they very nearly pulled off a famous victory.

Our cable certifier products are like this. When Test-Um designed the Validator product it was unlike anything on the market. No other tester generated traffic and measured what actually happened to it. Other manufacturers dismissed the idea publicly, but guess what, today most of them have products that do just what Validator does.

The temperature monitors also display some of these characteristics. They are deliberately very simple, to install and to use, they use standard SNMP and can be managed using a wide range of software solutions, they just do what is expected.

Sometimes having the confidence to go your own way, to trust your own instincts to do things a little differently pays off and results in better products.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 @ 4:45 pm on the category General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.