One of our sales guys recently came to his manager because his customer told him that our competitor cost half our price. Worst yet, the competitor was offering this OEM customer an annual unlimited deal. He could distribute the viewers without limit for a year at a bargain price.
We had several options:
- Knowing our product was better, we could succumb and offer the same price.
- We could explain to the customer why our product is better and provides more value. This depends if quality matters to them–sometimes they’re just going by price or a checklist.
- We could wait for them to figure out their mistake.
When we ran the test files, we got the results listed below. I doubt our prospect performed the same kind of tests with the types of files we use (we have a lot of test files that challenge even Adobe and Microsoft). And he or she may never encounter them and therefore remain blissfully happy ever after. But if your job is on the line, maybe a proven, industrial strength solution is the way to go? Hundreds of customers and millions of users who have chosen Snowbound and successfully used our products for over 18 years can’t all be wrong.
How To Choose A Vendor
- Test them with something hard – The true test of a seasoned product is testing it with difficult problems, not easy ones. Conforming to the specs often doesn’t cover corrupt or problem documents .
- Ask early if they can support you as you need it – 24×7, disaster recovery, indemnification, confidentiality. Are all these policies and programs already in place?
- Longevity – Are they a startup that will sell out in a year and get buried inside a large company that doesn’t value what they do?
- Does their product have legs and depth – Do they have the features you and the other groups in your company need?
- Is the product and company mature? – Solving customer problems over many years is the time-tested method to gain product sophistication.
Sample Document Test Results for PDF and MS Word Viewing
Of 8 documents, there were 4 complete failures by the competitor, including two crashes. Snowbound’s VirtualViewer only temporarily crashed on one 78 MB PDF file until more memory was allocated. For all situations where both viewers rendered the document correctly, VV was 35-110% faster.
#1
Test Doc: PDF (Retail Catalog), 39 pages, 78MB, 24bit, 8×11, Vector
Competitor: Crashed trying to load
Vv HTML5: Crashed initially then reloaded with more memory, 21sec load time
#2
Test Doc: PDF, (Engineering Drawing), 1 page, 16MB, 1 bit, 24×36, Raster
Competitor: Crashed trying to load
Vv HTML5: 30 Seconds
#3
Test Doc: PDF, (Heavy Form Data), 8 page, .7MB, 1bit, 8×11, Vector
Competitor: 23 seconds
Vv HTML5: 17 seconds
#4
Test Doc: PDF (Unknown Creator App), 3 page, .24MB, 1bit, 8×11, Raster
Competitor: PDF library would not convert it
Vv HTML5: 5 seconds
#5
Test Doc PDF (Engineering Drawing) 1 page, 1MB, 1bit, 11×18 Vector
Competitor: 23 seconds
Vv HTML5: 11 seconds
#6
Test Doc: DOCX (Brochure) 1 page, .7MB, 24bit, 8×11
Competitor: 7 seconds
Vv HTML5: 5 seconds
#7
Test Doc: DOCX (Hebrew Text) 1 page, 15KB, 1bit, 8×11
Competitor: 3 seconds (did not load any fonts correctly)
Vv HTML5: 6 seconds (loaded all fonts correctly)
#8
Test Doc: DOCX (complex fonts) 8 page, 45KB, 1bit, 8×11
Competitor: 4 seconds (did not load some of the fonts properly)
Vv HTML5: 7 seconds (loaded all fonts correctly)
