Monthly Archives: July 2008

Breaking Security

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Sometimes the only way to win a market is to break it. Markets tend to stagnate. Solutions become entrenched due to offerings being well understood and being good enough. To enter such markets with the same class of product is an elegant and expensive form of corporate suicide. When faced with such situations you need to invent products and services that not only add value but shatter the current market precepts. Think of Genghis Khan as a new and different product and the Xia Dynasty as the established market. Call it creative destruction or disruptive technology. The marketing principle at play is that offering the same product as everyone else means you offer nothing at all and that you will eventually compete on price. That is the definition of a commodity and that is a lousy way to make a living. A case in point of shattering a stagnant market … Continue reading →

SaaS Surprises

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Who would have thought Oracle would lead the SaaS market. Not that I hold perfect confidence in the source of these numbers, but a report at venture capital focused SandHill.com shows Oracle at the #1 slot for companies using and considering vendors for SaaS deployments. In fact, top-shelf companies fill the top shelves of the SaaS vendor list. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft are all players. The early-advantage entry — SalesForce.com — scores a trailing 11% compared to Oracle’s 16% and Microsoft’s 14%. Sarah Friar — the Goldman Sachs analyst who wrote this report — tells me that the focus of the survey was at the application level. I would have automatically believed her numbers had  databases and infrastructure management tools been included. But focused on applications, Oracle’s dominance caught me by surprise. This spells bad news for SaaSy start-ups. Mature markets are dominated by an average of three vendors. This is … Continue reading →

Finding Niches

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I want to brag about a client of our for something they did on their own (kinda). We have had a relationship with Open-Xchange since our days advising SuSE Linux on their North American marketing strategy. Open-Xchange is groupware with highly usable features uncommon in other groupware offerings and with all components well integrated to make collaboration dirt easy. I routinely recommend the product to everyone I meet. Like many companies they started by selling on-site server software and had a tough time of it. Going toe-toe-toe with the likes of Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise and Lotus Notes is no easy feat. Despite a better over-all design and vastly better usability, Open-Xchange did not find the huge adoption it deserved. This was in part because the high end of the market was saturated. Online collaboration was recognized by top enterprises as a necessary tool. Thus the installed base was dominated … Continue reading →

Prompt and Persuasive Promotions

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I’m rarely impressed by other people’s promotions, but this one I have to share. When introducing your company, products or services you must rapidly communicate what it is, what makes it different, and why the prospect should be interested. The more abstract the product or service, the more difficult this becomes. When I came upon an online intro by NearSoft, I found a case study in how to do web promotions right. NearSoft is a near-by outsourcing software development house … in Mexico (not a country one normally has on a short list of offshore opportunities). Their value propositions are that (a) they are closer than India – same time zone as Phoenix – and (b) they eliminate many of the common offshore headaches (such as the cost of flying to India to manage project details). The folks at NearSoft knew they had to communicate their unique value propositions in … Continue reading →

Microsoft Myopia

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The technology business has more than its fair share of lose nuts.  Some are wealthy as well as insane, while the dot-communist are poor and insane.  Perhaps the key to success in this business is being bonkers. Sadly, some of the insanity is settling in Microsoft, as witnessed in a blog written by Sergey Solyanik.  Sergey recently escaped from Google and landed back at Microsoft.  Perhaps he had been on a spying mission all along.  Regardless, he seems to have mentally drifted in the direction of a room designed with very soft walls. “I can’t write code for the sake of the technology alone — I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.” (emphasis mine)  “Only” is a rather … Continue reading →