Groundhog Day Says @NEOCAST

We’ve got far too many wannabee consultants in this industry and not enough (or dare I say ‘any’) industry analysts who look at an event, at news, at a happening, a piece of gossip, rumour or whatever and then do any serious yet IMPARTIAL analysis of same (note ‘the elephant in the room‘, i.e. the majority of the NA industry consultants are on the Samsung payroll ^[1]).

So, once again it comes down to a digital signage software CEO (with a proper day job we might add) to write a credible piece of critique and analysis of our breaking news yesterday that Intel was going to go head to head with such vendors and launch their own digital signage content management system software ^[2].

Ken Goldberg’s article is well worth reading (click here ^[3]) in its entirety. We’d simply comment and add as follows:-

1. We quote “Had Intel applied its influence and marketing dollars to promote OPS^† as a standard, perhaps they could have changed the way media players are made, sold and deployed, quite possibly to their own advantage” and would say we could not agree more. OPS is / was a big missed opportunity. It could have been a bellwether for standards setting BUT as Ken says, “Sadly, that did not happen”.
2. We spoke to Intel 18 months ago about their potential support of OpenSplash ^[4]. Those discussions fell on deaf ears – just imagine, some of Intel’s clusterf**k budget spent with a few choice contractors (think Jeff Porter ^[5] or Drew Topel ^[6]) and we could have solved some of the real industry problems that are out there (and Intel would truly have given something back to the industry AND be seen as a thought leader).

The industry does not need any more digital signage software solutions ^[7] and it certainly doesn’t need one from a chipmaker who doesn’t understand the industry.

^† Open Pluggable Specification