Change their tune

Stuck between a foul-mouthed chef and 12 desperates locked in a house on TV last week, I ended up watching a repeat of a film called Shooting Fish.

For those who haven't seen it, the film is about two guys who con businessmen out of their money so they can save up for their dream house. But what intrigued me was their method of duping people.

The two conmen had set up a fake PC and claimed it could do basically everything, bar make you a cup of coffee. They pretended to solve non-existent IT problems using a machine with more frills than a grandma's doily.

It occurred to me that, even though the film is seven years old, this is still how many end-users perceive IT.

More worryingly, this is still how many vendors are pushing their products; overloading functionality onto products to solve imaginary problems.

But far too many bells and whistles can quite often lead to a tune that the end-user just doesn't want to hear.

When Windows XP first appeared, one of the criticisms was that there were so many extra features, end-users became reluctant to pay for the functionality they were not going to use for problems they didn't have.

Last week Acer conceded that the tablet PC is not catching on as it would have hoped. The vendor wanted the technology to account for 20 per cent of its sales last year. At the moment it doesn't even make up 10 per cent.

It's a great technology, but most end-users do not have problems that can be solved by a tablet - at least not yet.

Solving problems using technology functionality is a gradual process and needs to be dealt with on a step-by-step basis.

Unlike the clueless victims in Shooting Fish, most IT executives these days know the immediate problems that need solving. But many still do not recognise what future problems could arise.

This is where resellers need to help with advice and experience, selling each bell and each whistle of functionality at a pace dictated by the user, to ensure that both parties end up singing from the same hymn sheet.