Best of Breed vs. All-in-One
There is something to be said for the Swiss Army knife. It’s a great little tool that can help you in a jam. But if you’re not in a predicament, and you have the opportunity to plan, then it’s better to be prepared with a full size set of tools so that you can perform the task at hand thoroughly and with precision and accuracy. When these quality attributes do not matter, the smaller tool will suffice. Indeed, there will always be a market for Swiss Army knives. Consumers will find the use of the all-in-one tool convenient and suitable to satisfy their simple requirements.
However, many consumers have complex requirements that occur with greater frequency. In these cases, quality and flexibility are the attributes prioritized ahead of convenience. These are the tasks that cannot be performed without a full-size set of tools.
The same is true with technology. Many all-in-one solutions, with the good intention of providing better value, fail to satisfy large segments of consumers who require greater quality and flexibility attributes. A good example of this is with regard to home theater. With the advent of HD TV, the fascination with home theater has climbed in recent years. Every TV comes with speakers; however in order to enhance the listening experience, consumers continually upgrade their speakers and components as their tastes, preferences and requirements change over time.
When it comes to your customer’s experience, be very careful about getting locked in with an all-in-one provider and consider carefully whether the pros outweigh the cons. On the pro side, you gain the benefit of bundled value pricing. You also maintain convenience and simplicity by limiting the number of vendor relationships. On the con side, it is difficult to find experts to help you with each component of your all-in-one solution since your support call will be handled by their all-in-one Help Desk. In addition, the all-in-one solution contains merely of subset of full solution functionality, and this lack of flexibility may cause challenges for you as your business needs evolve with the marketplace. One more con to keep in mind is that each component of the all-in-one solution is heavily dependent upon the other. Therefore, it is possible that single component failure affects multiple solutions and deepens the impact on your customers and business partners.
