February 20, 2007

Cheap Shaving Cream Technology

Last week, I was shopping in Pathmark, our local super market and saw that Barbasol Shaving cream was $.99! I snapped up a can as my Gillette shaving cream was thrown away at the airport recently.

When I did my first shave with it, I instantly knew something was clearly wrong.

The cream felt like watered down shaving cream in my hand and I was cut 2 or 3 times during the save. This never happened to me when using Gillette's shaving gel.

What does this mean to you?

It means that when you see a low cost, cheap technology product on the market, don't rush to buy it. Sure, the words FREE might be VERY attractive to you. But the words - down time, not working, angry customers and other words that could result based on your use of "cheap" technology might be very un-attractive.

I took the Barbasol shaving cream back and bought the $2.49 Gillette Gel instead (only later on did I realize that Barbasol sells gel as well, by the way).

What about your computer purchases. Maybe there's a new company selling notebook computers for half the price of everyone else. Should you buy a few for your sales team? Maybe things will be just fine. But what a horror it would be if you bought the computers and you kept losing sales as your sales team kept having their computers stop working during a critical sales call.

What about your Internet service? Maybe there's a company that's selling DSL 25% less than the competition does. If you buy it, will you have to reboot your router every few hours and deal with your ISP telling you about regular service outages?

It's great to find low cost technology. Everyone wants to save money. But don't "save" money at the expense of "losing" money using your cheap technology.

Remember - support, reliability and easy of use are three key portions of any technology purchase.

This reminds me, there's a resurgence of "free" software products on the market. They are free in lieu of advertising or in the hopes of selling you on a higher version of the products with fees. For many of these "free" products you can try them out first.

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