Marketing is a strange beast to observe in the wild. If you think about it, many marketing campaigns are aimed at the undecided, not the jaded. Have you ever heard of a “Coke person” switching to Pepsi because of an informative and innovative marketing campaign? Not a chance; but in more ambiguous markets, such as technology, marketing can be an influence, but at the end of the day it is the product that must deliver.

One lesson we can learn from the Apple Corporation is that the only technological constant is change. Look no farther than the iPod and the iPhone. Why is it that Apple’s competition has yet to close the gap in sales or technological evolution to the point where people will abandon iPods or iPhones in favor of an upstart device? Part of the answer lies in Apple’s refusal to rest on their laurels, and their need to stay not one, but several steps ahead of their competition.

Before I return to that point, know that I’m not an Apple fanatic, and believe their computers and related devices (e.g. the forthcoming iPad) have little utility in the real world of business.  Whether you love, hate, or simply tolerate Microsoft, they are still the best choice for business computing and collaborative tools. Sure, I’ve read all of the bashing of the Vista operating system, yet I have never had the slightest problem with it. I have recently started to work with Windows 7, and it appears to be stable and functional as well. But look at what 99% of the world depends on from Microsoft, besides the operating system. Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint rule the business world.  Businesses like Microsoft for a number of good reasons.

Apart from the Apple universe, we have the open source crowd of tools. There are people who are crazily enthusiastic with tools such as Ubuntu and Firefox.  Most of my knowledge of Ubuntu, the open source OS and office tools set, is vicarious—reading reviews and such online, but I have worked with Firefox.

As for Ubuntu, well, if you have time, and have a bit of geek (and anarchist) in you, have at it. It does seem to have issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) for protected music, but I suspect these will be cleaned out at some point. Firefox? In my early tests, many web sites blew up when accessed by Firefox, but the Mozilla bunch seems to have circumvented those problems.

Personally, my confidence in the whole open source movement was eroded when I saw my beloved email client, Eudora, put out to pasture in the open source world. The developers took the venerable (and I still nurse the unsupported Qualcomm version 7 on a few computers) email program and gutted it out so severely that it resembles those movie stars who had one too many plastic surgery procedures and now look like the Joker from The Dark Knight.

So, back to Apple and the things I do envy about the company. When MP3 players started to come out in mass production to compete with the iPod, Apple had moved several steps on the evolutionary path. My first iPod was the white thumbwheel version with a mini disk drive inside, had 5 gigabytes of storage, black and white screen, no video, and a ten hour battery life. Today’s iPod?  Try 64 gigabytes, twenty hours of battery, and a great color screen. The only minor omission from Apple is how I might pay for the 12,800 songs I can store on the unit (I know, had I bought a few thousand shares of Apple twenty years ago…).

The iPhone? I have the 16 gigabyte 3G version and am in technophile love with the device. I won’t upgrade every year, but I will be anxious to see what happens when the 4G model comes out, maybe in a year, with the rumored  5 megapixel camera, OLED display, dual core processor, and front-facing video camera. Couple those (alleged) features with a screamingly fast 4G network, and we should see ATT’s bandwidth crushed like a rotten grape. By comparison, can you name another popular smart phone with a huge and loyal following? How about the Blackberry? Great as an email tool, but in the ATT world where Apple resides, most Blackberry’s messaging is conducted not over the speedy 3G network, but over the archaic EDGE network. And for those of you out there who managed music on their Blackberry, well, if you haven’t slit your wrist over the clunky approach to passing music from your iTunes library to your Blackberry, then you’ve not experienced the elegance of Apple’s solution to music management.

In the LIMS world, I read with some amusement about the development of open source LIMS.  The inherent issues with such an application run deep, and render such an application useful to a limited number of potential users.  It is one thing to have a loose cadre of developers working on a specific initiative whereby the communication interfaces between one element of the system and the next can be defined through some narrowly defined protocols.  Let’s return to Apple for a moment as a point of example.

Apple supplies the OS for the iPhone, but one of the compelling success stories for the iPhone centers around their application Developer’s Tool Kit. Tens of thousands of applications have been cobbled together using the toolkit, and those applications clearly separate Apple from the smart phone pack by light years. Yet, the underlying tenant for the Tool Kit is that Apple strictly defines what you can and cannot do. They protect the interface to their iPhone OS.

But in a true unified platform, one cannot have islands of automated widgets that will talk to the LIMS. Some standalone vendors of Method Execution ELNs tried this approach, and lacking any true market penetration, have not only eschewed interfacing to commercial LIMS applications, they are trying to convince people LIMS aren’t needed—as long as you have a robust ERP to do the heavy lifting.

But in a true unified laboratory informatics platform, the applications that comprise that environment must not only communicate fluidly, they must be intimately aware of the purpose, structure, and function of each module in the system, not to mention the overall workflow through the product.

What is the alternative?  Returning to standalone Method Execution ELN vendors, they must expose and consume information through workaround interfaces or file transfers. Such an approach is virtually unworkable in the real world, and places the responsibility for the integrity of the interface on the backs of the consumers.

In the STARLIMS world, powerful tools are integrated into our unified platform. Our Scientific Document Management System (SDMS) is a powerful and flexible tool for obtaining information from a number of sources external to the STARLIMS core. Our Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) is tightly integrated into STARLIMS, and renders external Method Execution ELN applications unnecessary and obsolete. Our clinical and forensics dictionaries change the complexion of STARLIMS so they map tightly to the needs of those specific customers.

Returning to the central theme of this posting, although some LIMS suppliers are now trying to emulate some aspects of STARLIMS industry-leading unified platform, STARLIMS continues to widen the gap by listening to our customers, monitoring industry trends, and building our environment on a powerful Microsoft platform. While some suppliers are trying to capitalize on STARLIMS’s innovative design successes, STARLIMS is already designing the next generation of LIMS.

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