What They Say
Yesterday, I reported about Mitsubishi Electric and that links to its Diamond Vision business from its website didn’t seem to work. I followed up and got a response within a few hours that said “… we Diamond Vision do not have a sales channel in the UK currently. Thus, let us refrain from proposing our LED screens…”.
What We Think
We thought we weren’t going to get much sense from that route so we logged onto the Mitsubishi Electric USA site and found that if we did that, we could see information about Diamond Vision, so the firm is still in the big LED business, in the US at least.
I wondered if the links breaking were a crude way to block access just because I was trying to see the information from outside the US? In the process of looking at what was going on, I noticed that the firm was not asking for permission before storing cookies. In my understanding that is a breach of European Data Privacy legislation, which is surprising for a large and global organisation. When I had a lot of contacts with Mitsubishi Electric, like a couple of other firms I can think of, the technology was often better than the marketing and that still seems to be the case.
Years ago, I ran the subsidiary of a Japanese company. My boss used to get frustrated that although I had had a general business education (and had qualifications in this area), I had not spent significant time working in each department of the business, as I would have done if I had worked in management in Japan and been in my mid-thirties. My career had been in sales and marketing all the time. The good side of the Japanese approach was that it developed good general managers with a very detailed appreciation of all aspects of the business. On the other hand, it didn’t develop really good specialists in business (although it did in engineering). The Western model of specialisation has the advantage of producing good specialists, but often not such ’rounded’ business managers. (BR)
