Business Two Zero now @ biztwozero.com

This blog has moved and changed to WP

2006-04-18T11:32:00.000+01:00

Business Two Zero is alive and well, hosted by Yahoo! Small Business in a new WordPress flavour, using Mike Little's Journalized theme. Come and find us at http://biztwozero.com

Blogging - New media value and SEO

2006-01-30T10:19:00.000Z

Dennis Howlett and I did a podcast yesterday about the basics of blogging, touching on the good reasons for doing it, Search Engine Optimisation, but also covering websites in general, and the marketing aspects around them. We moved on to the use of Software as a Service based systems in business and accounting, but ended with the importance of blogging as part of your marketing strategy. Dennis has called it New media value and SEO. Please have a listen.

Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, SEO, websites, media

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Are we heading for a Dot.com bubble?

2006-01-30T10:18:00.000Z

We definitely have a technology boom, triggered by the lower cost of entry for budding entrepreneurs, but some would suggest that must mean we are heading for a bubble that will burst. Chris Anderson has written an insightful piece in the latest Wired which suggests otherwise. He says:

"Companies are once again minting millionaires, but venture capitalists are investing less than a fifth of what they were at the 2000 peak. About 50 technology companies went public last year, but more than 300 went public in 1999."

And at the end of the piece:

"So there you have the recipe for a healthy boom, not a fragile bubble: a more receptive marketplace, lower costs, and lighter pressure from investors. Today, the typical exit strategy is to sell your startup to Yahoo! for a few million, not to maneuver for a rowdy IPO and an appearance on CNBC. Highway 101 is jammed with Prius-driving engineers, not biz-dev guys in Beemers. And most New York cab drivers are happily ignorant of what's hot in the Valley, just as they should be."

Please go and read the full article, and relax about the characteristics of the current technology market growth.

Technorati Tags : business2.0, web2.0, dot.com, SaaS, entrepreneur, VC

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Business Two Zero has moved and improved!

2006-01-29T02:06:00.000Z

I've just reached that point when I've outgrown this free Blogger service, and so have taken the plunge to switch to WordPress on my own domain. So, Business Two Zero is in a new place, with a new look and feel.

We have moved to www.businesstwozero.com or biztwozero.com - please follow the links, read the latest, and bookmark our new location.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, Blogger, WordPress, BusinessTwoZero

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The best of Web 2.0 of 2005

2006-01-27T20:49:00.000Z

Towards the end of last year I missed Dion Hinchcliffe's review of the best Web 2.0 offerings he'd seen during the year. There are some I agree with, like Delicious, some I'm not so sure of, like Memeorandum, and some I hadn't heard of - Rallypoint and the online calendar products. I'm particularly interested in checking out the online file storage products.
Technorati Tags : Web2.0, Delicious, memeorandum, writely, basecamp, zoho, storage, flickr, digg

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This week's New Ajax Homepage

2006-01-27T08:19:00.000Z

I feel I might be catching Listomania, a blogger's disease where you serially post lists from other blogs. I will keep taking the medicine. However, I spotted another list you might be interested in, but which also highlights two trends in the industry. A while ago I posted about the way that the Web 2.0 world has lowered the point of entry for Entrepreneur's to start a business, and related Joe Kraus' story - it cost him $3,000,000 to start Excite in the 90s, but only $100,000 to start JotSpot last year. Consequently we have new tech enterprises beginning at an almost alarming rate, which is causing some people to worry that another dot.com bubble is upon us. One of the new technologies that are being used more and more, in our own and other products is Ajax. There is a particular spate of Ajax based homepage products. Techcrunch reckons that they are arriving at a rate of 1 every 2 weeks. In this piece they discuss the latest entrant Wrickr , but also list 10 others. They are all interesting in highlighting the extra level of usability that is coming in web based applications, and in demonstrating the talent that is being released. It's not a dot.com bubble, but an innovation boom thatis upon us.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, ajax, dot.com, entrepreneur, Techcrunch, JotSpot, homepage, listomania

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - Supplemental

2006-01-26T16:18:00.000Z

For those of you who liked my guide to blogging, I'm planning a supplemental resource when I move off Blogger shortly. I've seen lots of lists recently, but I couldn't resist pointing you at Kevin Pierpoint's 10 Lists of 10 for Smashing Blog Success. There is some good stuff in there, along with some inevitable overlap. But actually there are 11 lists, so 110 ideas for your blog.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, SEO, marketing, writing, design

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Analysts who really understand Software as a Service

2006-01-25T22:24:00.000Z

Here's something from Phil Wainewright's Zdnet Software as Services blog:

"There are plenty of industry analysts out there who will rent-a-quote about SaaS and on-demand, but only a handful really understand what it's all about."

So go and read Phil's thoughts on 8 you should listen to.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, analysts, business, business2.0, on demand

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Top 10 Beautiful Physics Experiments

2006-01-25T17:39:00.000Z

Now this doesn't have much to do with business or Web 2.0, but it's an interesting diversion, that I'm sure will spark an idea for you. Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. This site shows, with nice graphics, the top 10 chosen by those scientists.

Technorati Tags : Physics, experiments

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Zoho - the web based document writer

2006-01-24T19:24:00.000Z

After Writely and ThinkFree, I've come across another interesting online alternative to Word called Zoho Writer. This has a very neat interface, which I assume uses AJAX, and some very interesting features. It looks like a combination of the best components of the other two. You can invite people to collaborate with you on the document, and it retains full version control. The service is free and you store your documents in your own folder style storage area. You can print documents as PDFs and even publish them to the popular blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.

Zoho also has a family of products that do collaboration, CRM, to-do planning and application creation. I'll be investigating these further over the coming weeks, and plan a fuller review of Writer.
Technorati Tags : Zoho, Writely, ThinkFree, SaaS, blogging, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress

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Now we have Microsoft Live, does that mean that their old products should be re-branded Microsoft Dead?

2006-01-24T16:35:00.000Z

This is one of the excellent lines spoken by Marc Benioff, the CEO & Chairman of Salesforce.com, at their European launch of Winter 06 and AppExchange today at the Portman Hotel in London. It's the first time I've seen him speak in the flesh, and he is certainly a very direct and straight talking individual, commanding the stage and interjecting in to the presentations on several occasions. He had plenty to say disparaging Oracle, SAP and Siebel for their lack of understanding of the new paradigm, or as he calls it "The End of Software". By the way, have you seen the great game they've created on their site to attract disaffected Siebel employees - it's akin to the arcade game where you wallop an animal on the head - go have a look.

The session started with a US TV interview of writer and journalist Thomas Friedman explaining that we are at the "Mother of all turning points". His argument is that the combination of the digital age of the PC, the new world of the Internet, and the availability of workflow software has flattened the World and created the Business Web. This must be one of the threads in his recent book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which also covers globalisation and the after affects of 9/11. At one stage he commented that "geeky guys are predicting this is the end of Microsoft", and after the recording Benioff professed to be one of those geeky guys, and agreed that's what he would be doing today!

The rest of the session presented the latest flavour of Salesforce.com and a number of customers explaining how they are using it, and partners demonstrating their add-on applications that are available through AppExchange. They are trying to make this platform like an iTunes or eBay for applications, both in terms of a development platform for partners, as well as a distribution mechanism to get their products to market. They even managed to have one of the demonstrators online by webcam and web demo from his base in South India. I'm sure the organisers were relieved when that worked!

There were some very good demonstrations of how you can integrate Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that have a proper web API, with other applications with a web API, such as Google maps. These are called mashups, and they can look seamless to the user, as well as being inexpensive to do.

Overall the key message was strong. The world of SaaS, or as they call it "no software" is definitely upon us and the old guard better watch out.
Technorati Tags : Business 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Benioff, Friedman, Oracle, Siebel, SAP, iTunes, eBay, mashup, on demand, ASP

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Does the Internet need a health warning?

2006-01-22T21:15:00.000Z

Or at least an accuracy warning? Publishing anything on the Internet is incredibly easy, without the checks and balances and editorial control applied in the traditional media. That's part of its beauty, but it comes with some risks. That means that you need to take care in how you use the words you'll find, and sometimes corroborate your sources in the way a journalist would before he published anything. Hear are some examples of what I mean from major to minor.

Wikipedia is a really excellent resource. The encyclopaedia written and kept up to date by us. However, it is not perfect and contains widely publicised inaccuracies. There was quite a furore back in December. Wikipedia's own pages now explain the issue:

The John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy occurred after an anonymous editor posted a hoax in the Wikipedia entry for John Seigenthaler Sr. in May 2005. In September, Victor S. Johnson, Jr., an old friend of Seigenthaler's, discovered the entry, which suggested that Seigenthaler may have had a role in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

As you might imagine, this generated a lot of heat. Danah Boyd on Many 2 Many tells some more about the story, and it has led to some changes in editorial procedure at Wikipedia. In some areas the resource is quite amazing, but in others you need to take care. My football team, West Ham United, is listed, but until a few days ago it was described as a semi professional team (original entry clearly written by a Spurs, Arsenal or Chelsea supporter!) but the page has just been updated by some Happy Hammer - thank heavens.

Back on 3rd January, Robert Scoble caused a stir from his blog by castigating his own company, Microsoft, for taking down Zhao Jing's blog site in China after government pressure, and then backtracking on his comments. Corante has a good analysis of the events.

To get away from assassinated presidents and global politics, on a more mundane footing I recently referred to a comparison of blogging software in my "insider's guide to blogging", only to be told by a colleague that there are inaccuracies in the chart. Whether this is because things have changed since the time the author penned the article, or because of her lack of knowledge, I don't know. However, for me it is a lesson learned to take care, issue disclaimers where appropriate, and check my facts like any good reporter. As with many things it's caveat emptor. Oh, and that's one you can look up on Wikipedia and get the right answer.

Technorati Tags : Internet, accuracy, Wikipedia, Siegenthaler, Scobleiser, Corante, blogging, WHUFC

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 4

2006-01-21T02:12:00.000Z

What do I do now?

So you've been inspired to start a blog, you believe the ROI messages from Part 2, Part 3 has helped you choose a platform, but now what? This section gives you some guidance on the key things you need to do to make this a success, and points you to plenty of resources that will help.

First, you've got to get the purpose of this new blog clear in your mind. You might be selling something specific, or you might be taking an indirect approach and promoting your expertise in a particular area so that potential clients like what they hear, want to work with you and check out your company. You might be sharing expertise around your organisation, or you might be using the medium to connect directly with your customers. Whichever it is, get that vision clear in your mind.

Next, give the blog a theme. It might include your musings and rants, but give it an identity around something that you're passionate about. There is an enormous amount of content out there, and you need to make yours worthy of people's attention. That will happen if yours gets mixed with your enthusiasm and passion.

Get a domain name of your own. Blogger and TypePad domain names are OK, but you wouldn't start your company site on Geocities would you? In any case, you will almost certainly want to switch platforms at some point, and this will be easier if you've got your own address.

Get in to the habit of writing and set aside some time every day, or week. If you want your site to get noticed, you need to feed it, so it can feed the audience and the their news aggregators.

Cross post and comment on as many sites as you can. Make sure your site is easy to access, with RSS feeds, Atom, or a subscription option, or all of these. Have a blogroll of blogs you read and people you like. There is an interesting rule in blogging - the more you send them away, the more they'll come back. So the more you connect with other bloggers, the more they'll connect with you, and that will improve your ranking.

And the topic that seems to be missed by so many bloggers - apply the rules of Search Engine Optimisation. In simple terms you want to get noticed by the search engines. That is more likely to happen if your blog titles aren't esoteric or clever, but say what the topic is about with the appropriate keywords. Your post should have those key words peppered around in prominent places. That, combined with the links you'll manage to get from those other bloggers who are wiser and more popular than you will enhance your page rank in Google, and bring more traffic to your site.

The good news is that there are plenty of advisers out there to help you. Here are some:

Dennis Howlett's take on the do's and don'ts for an accounting practice.

Darren Rowse is the problogger from Australia. He writes half a dozen successful blogs, and has plenty of advice for the more directly commercial blogger. Here's a selection from him:

18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging
Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days
Social Bookmarking - Getting your Blog Noticed
Search Engine Optimization Articles and Resources

Take a look at Aaron Brazzell's "The Blogger's Primer".

Thirty Stories up has their "7 Mistakes for your First Week Blogging".

This is Jakob Nielsen's "Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes".

And here is Mary Hodder's "A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work".

Presentation Zen asks "Where can you find good images?".

You need to do enough preliminary research to get the feel of what style and level of detail is going to work, but then just jump in and join the Global conversation.

If you missed them, here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, marketing, SEO, problogger, AccManPro, Cluetrain

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The Software-free Computer?

2006-01-20T02:05:00.000Z

How far away are we from the Software-free Computer? With Software as a Service solutions available for most applications we can get pretty close, but we'll still need things like MS Office on our deskstops won't we? Actually, no! With ThinkFree Office Online you get an equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint called Write, Show and Calc that are a Microsoft Office-compatible suite. What's more, for the basic service, they are free! It must just be worth checking out.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, Office, ThinkFree, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Write, Show, Calc

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - Part 3

2006-01-20T01:42:00.000Z

Which platform should I use?

With the tools available you could set up your new blog and be operational within 10 minutes of reading this post. It wouldn't need to cost you a penny, and there won't be any adverts on your site - unless you want to sell something! Even if you decide to go for one of the premium service options, we are talking a few pounds, euros, dollars a month. The technology is easy to set up, the online editors for your content work well, and it's reasonably straightforward to syndicate your content to the world with RSS. For the small or medium business, this is a low cost, low risk exercise to add the concept to your marketing mix, and to start having an online conversation with your market and customers.

There are perfectly acceptable free services available like Blogger (owned by Google) or WordPress.com. These are a good place to start. Blogger gives you all of the basic features you'll need, gives you a fair choice of template styles and allows you access to the template code itself. This means that with a little care and very modest knowledge of HTML you can customise your site's look and feel, to add links, add feeds, add skype buttons, add almost anything. Most of the useful utilities you can subscribe to provide you with the HTML to copy, and guidance on where to paste it in the template. WordPress.com gives you a good range of styles and templates, and is nicely configurable, but does not allow access to the template. So you are restricted in terms of look and feel and placing extra features and plug-ins, but it does have the concept of pages, as well as posts. You can set up as many pages in a hierarchy as you need, just like a Content Management System. This makes it easy for you to describe your business in as much detail as you need, alongside your regular blog posts. Either of these will work well.

The next level up is a product like TypePad, from Six Apart. Their pricing is from $5 to $15 a month, depending on how many blogs and authors you want to be involved, or to get extra features like photo albums. This offers a good range of features, templates and configuration, as well as access to the templates to add in those extra goodies.

The next option is to download blogging software yourself, so that you can take control of the templates and style and get the look and feel you really want. You could choose a commercial option like Moveable Type (MT), which is actually the software used by the TypePad service, or an open source (free) offering like WordPress.org (WP), which is the software used by WordPress.com. MT's pricing starts at $70 for a basic personal option, right up to $1,300 for a commercial licence for 50 users. WordPress just costs you the time and effort to download and install it. In both cases you'll need to budget for hosting the software. However, there are options for either WP or MT with Yahoo! Small Business, where you can rent appropriate server space with the capacity and bandwidth you need, and have either product installed and kept up to date for you.

Here is a good blog software comparison chart, (UPDATE: please note, Dennis Howlett tells me most of the no's for WP on this chart can actually be done with available plug-ins) and the accompanying article by Susannah Gardner which asks "Are you using the right blogging tool?". MT and WP are discussed in some detail by Vinnie Garcia in "Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed".

A recent poll of about a 1000 readers of problogger showed the following spread of platforms - 37% Wordpress.org, 22% Blogger, 8% Movable Type, 4% Expression Engine, 3.5% TypePad, 3% Wordpress.com and 49 different platforms in the survey.

There seems to be a phenomenon that bloggers start with something simple like Blogger or TypePad, but then after 3 to 6 months they feel the restrictions, and move up to something better. Stuart Jones recently moved his BusinessMatters blog from Blogger to TypePad. Dennis Howlett started on TypePad, but recently moved his AccMan Pro blog to WP. I'm about to move BTZ from Blogger to WP. The good news is that migration appears to be straightforward, with guidance available from platform to platform. Both Stuart and Dennis have good experiences in their transition, and that seems to be the norm. I hope so, but I'll tell you more on that once I've lived through it.

These products make it very easy for any business to get a web presence. I've noticed a number of companies recently setting up a blog site, and not bothering with a traditional website, for example GlobalBrain. Last night on the drive home I thought about my own accountant, who has an embarrassing holding page for her website, awaiting her technically minded husband to find time to finish the job. While I was thinking about this article it occurred to me that she could set up a WordPress.com account, start a blog, but use the tabs and pages to get some web presence explaining what she does. She had set something up within 30 minutes of my call. I won't point you to it until she's got some sensible content written, but it shows the power and ease of this medium.

The next in the series is Part 4 , which give you some ideas on how to start, things you must do to help make your site a success, mistakes to avoid, and some important words on the topic of Search Engine Optimization. If you missed them, here is where you find Part 1 and Part 2.

Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, RSS, Blogger, WordPress, Google, TypePad, SixApart, MovableType, Yahoo!, BusinessMatters, AccManPro, GlobalBrain

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Complete list of Web 2.0 applications

2006-01-19T21:48:00.000Z

This might be useful - Virtual Karma's (reasonably) complete, alphabetically sorted, list of popular Web 2.0 applications. The description for each of the application is taken from their own About or FAQ pages.
Technorati Tags : Web 2.0, Business 2.0, applications

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 2

2006-01-19T00:46:00.000Z

Is it worth it? What's the ROI?

Well it is a big regular investment in time if you are going to make it successful, and a nil to modest investment in technology, with excellent free or low cost services and tools available. Part 3 will cover those technology choices, but is it worth it? In the best of guerrilla marketing traditions, a resounding YES!

A Web log created by Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon has helped build a community of enthusiasts, some of them far away from his traditional markets in Britain. It turned his ailing local business in to an Internationally known phenomenon. Go to English Cut, see the PR it has helped create or listen to the podcast (and while you are there, sign up for his newsletter).

Blogging has doubled Stormhoek's wine sales (a South African brand) in less than twelve months.

Robert Scoble has a major impact blogging for Microsoft.

Big Blue bit by the blogging bug and now Christopher Barger is IBM's "blogger in chief". He is helping lead the computer giant's efforts to make everyone in the company familiar with blogs.

On 17 December 2005 in his 3 month progress report, and just before he moved from the Typepad platform to WordPress, Dennis Howlett wrote of his AccMan Pro, accounting practice oriented blog:

"As of close of play today, we've had 6,270 visits with 13,350 page views. And I've now penned some 297 articles, receiving 84 comments. Thank you all. It's shaping what I do."

I wonder what point you are at now Dennis? I would guess the pace is increasing.

Some other commentary you can look at:

Blogging ROI: Building a Customer Base from Crossroad Dispatches.

What's the ROI of blogging? from Collective Conversations.

Or what's blogging's r.o.i.? from Gaping Void

And lastly, to demonstrate the power of this stuff The Best Blonde Joke Ever

If you missed part 1 it's here . The series carries on with Part 3 - plaform selection and Part 4 - key lessons and SEO.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, ROI, English Cut, Stormhoek, AccManPro, IBM, Scoble, Typepad, WordPress

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Actually, it is Del.icio.us!

2006-01-18T23:12:00.000Z

Now that Del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo!, I really thought I should give it a try. The power of being able to get at your bookmarks from any PC helps me enormously in many of the projects I do, and the ease of tagging them for finding later is a jump ahead of MyWeb 2.0 which I was using previously. If you haven't looked at it yet, make the time, and you could read this interesting treatise on how it could help you - The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users.

Technorati Tags : Yahoo, MyWeb, Del.icio.us, social, bookmarking

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The Power of Passion

2006-01-18T21:59:00.000Z

I don't see enough passion in business these days. I was talking to an old business colleague today, and we were discussing a company we both used to work for, and we were bemoaning the fact that they don't have a clear product strategy that's voiced with passion by the man at the top. I suggested this outfit's strategy was little more than making sure they make 10% profit next year. A laudable goal, but hardly anything to get excited about, or to make you feel part of something special. They're a traditional software and consulting company of course.

Over at Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds is talking about it:

The best presenters I have ever seen were not trained actors or professional presenters (though they may indeed present a lot). The best presentations I have seen were from everyday business people, designers, or researchers who (1) had a clear interest in their topic and about sharing it with the audience, (2) had their material down clearly and accurately in their minds and in their visuals, and (3) they displayed a clear passion for the material and made warm connections with their audience, connections that were undoubtedly sincere.

He goes on to say you can't fake it, and it's not about being perfect, but passion matters!

Technorati Tags : Passion, presentation, business, Presentation Zen

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You need some PureText

2006-01-18T02:41:00.000Z

With most blogging and many CMS programs, you can hit all sorts of formatting problems with a cut/paste from Word. The mess of codes that Word uses can give unpredictable results, so it's normal (and a pain) to copy text in to Notepad, which strips out the codes and leaves the raw text for you to select and copy again. I'm indebted to Sabine at CT Biz Blogs who tipped me off to Steve Miller's PureText. This free plug in sits in your system tray and does the equivalent of the cut/paste in and out of Notepad for you with one click. Excellent!

Technorati Tags : productivity, blogging, CMS

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - part 1

2006-01-17T12:14:00.000Z

Introduction - get blogging!

When I started writing this blog back in October it was triggered by conversations I'd been having with Dennis Howlett, along with the realisation that roughly 80,000 new blogs are created each day, and that Blogs mean Business. Here is a wave you need to catch! I firmly believe you should consider starting a blog today, but more importantly you need to understand how this phenomenon is changing the world's of media, marketing and in turn business in general. For any organisation on a tight marketing budget (which is most!) it can be an asset to your guerrilla marketing plans providing you avoid certain mistakes, get the right advice, and recognise that you are starting something which will need constant and consistent effort to make it successful.

There are plenty of resources you can access or books to read on the topic. For example, two of blogging's leading lights Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have just written "Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers".

Over the next few days and weeks I intend to be posting a series of articles on the topic, and pointing you towards some of the better resources there are on the web to help you out. One of the choices you'll need to make is which platform do you start on. This blog is currently powered by Blogger, which is great free service and as good a place to start as any. However, if you are serious about blogging, you'll soon outgrow it and want to change to something more powerful. I'll be journaling my thoughts on this, the decision process I'm just going through on which platform to choose, and then how painful or easy the process of conversion is for me and my site. I hope to have moved on to a different platform well before the end of January, but we will see.

I know that just talking about this post has already triggered one of my blogging chums to write a piece on the issues around taking on blogging for your company. One of the beauties of this medium is the way the conversations can interconnect to add value to the message you are trying to communicate. If you haven't researched this topic already, put some time aside this week to find out more.

Update: For the rest of the series, you'll find them at Part 2 - why and ROI, Part 3 - platform selection, and Part 4 - key lessons and SEO.

Technorati Tags : blogs, blogging, Blogger, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, AccManPro, marketing, Business 2.0

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The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint

2006-01-16T09:21:00.000Z

Just before Christmas I attended a customer briefing with one of our business partners, who were explaining their revised product strategy and other issues for that client. The ideas and information exchanged were all great, but the PowerPoint slides were unreadable. They would have been excellent as a supporting handout, but most people in the room couldn't possibly read them. Why does this happen all too often?

Way back in 1988 (when I was an IBM agent) I attended a fantastic presentation laid on by IBM on presentation skills by the best presenter I have ever seen. He is David A. Peoples, and I immediately bought his book Presentations Plus, which I still refer to regularly. My copy is the first edition from 1988, the currently available edition is 1992, and some reviewers criticise it for being written in the pre-PowerPoint era, when we used flip charts and foil projectors. I suggest this is a positive advantage. Much too often these days, when people think about their presentation it is in terms of the particular content and flow of their PowerPoint slides, when they should start by thinking what do I want to say, and what is the best medium for getting that message across?

I'm indebted to David Tebbutt's blog for tipping me off to Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint. Here is what Guy says:

"I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc."

In these days where PowerPoint is the medium of choice, this is an excellent maxim, but don't forget to spice up your approach with some extra visual aids that don't appear up on the white screen. Buy Presentations Plus, get some ideas from places like Presentation Zen, and do something different.
Technorati Tags : presentations, Tebbo, Guy Kawasaki, PowerPoint

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Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

2006-01-15T22:47:00.000Z

Tomorrow I'm with a customer facilitating a design workshop for their new website. I know they are keen that their new site makes a striking first impression, but I hadn't realised quite how important that is until I saw this research on Nature.com which says that potential readers can make snap decisions in less than 50 milliseconds:

"Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions."

Read the full article, but try and take a very quick look at your own site with fresh eyes.

Technorati Tags : website, design, marketing, Nature

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Vandalism strikes everywhere

2006-01-14T13:50:00.000Z

My local parish council (Sandridge Parish, St. Albans) have decided to support renewable energy initiatives and publicise the concept by installing and using solar roof panels on one of our (Jersey Farm) community centres. A laudable idea, but the day the installation was due to finish some fine member of our community put a brick through one of the panels, so now there is a wrangle over insurance and repairs, and the extra expense of installing polycarbonate sheeting for protection.

On my last post I mentioned the Million Dollar Home Page, but wondered why the link didn't seem to work. I discover that poor Alex Tew's well publicised site is under intense DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. I don't know what that is, but it is enough to bring the site down, as measures to prevent that aren't part of Alex's service package with his ISP InfoRelay. The article I read suggested:

The attacks are coming from computers worldwide, including the U.S., Europe and Asia, Weiss said. The attacks could be the work of a botnet - a network of computers illegally commandeered for sending spam and DDoS attacks.

It sounds like InfoRelay are trying to help (they'd have a PR disaster if they didn't!), and doing more than they've been paid for:

InfoRelay has been in contact with law enforcement about the attacks, and has worked with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation before, Weiss said. "We don't like to see this," he said. "It is illegal."

Don't you think this is appalling? Whether it is the brick flung by some disaffected youth, or these cyber vandals, spammers and virus creators, it means that we all pay for it in the extra protections we have to fund, or the extra work it generates for our companies and governments in the clean up. It's the reason why my company has to pay for a team sitting in The Hague monitoring our systems 24/7 for potential hacking attempts like this. Entirely necessary, but such a waste of the world's resources, not to mention the creative energy that goes in to these things that could be doing some good.

Technorati Tags : hackers, milliondollarhomepage, DDoS, InfoRelay

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The SaaS Debate and the Business 2.0 wave

2006-01-14T10:11:00.000Z

In recent weeks and months there has been an element of debate on AccountingWEB and various blog sites around the SaaS topic. Several of the players from traditional software vendors like Sage or Pegasus have weighed in, as well as contributing editors from the site itself, and don't forget some of us from the accounting and business community at large. Over on AccMan Pro, Dennis Howlett is taking it further with a series of pieces on "The Nightmare Scenario" of how this is part of several disruptions collectively called Business 2.0 (which is what this site's all about!) and how it, with Web 2.0, will change the business world that our kids are growing up to join. If you've got teenage kids, they need to know about this, but maybe they are ahead of you and are already thinking of ideas like Alex Tew's Million Dollar Home Page that has been so much in the International press in the last week.

AccountingWEB, to their credit, have come up with the excellent idea of setting up an Oxford Union style debate around the SaaS topic. It's a great idea, and in the context of what normally happens around these kinds of discussions, it's different!

On a site called Cluetrain, there are some fine words that relate to the topic:

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies."

They also have a manifesto with 95 theses. It's worth some of your time to trigger some ideas, but here are a few of them:

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

I believe 2006 is going to be a year of change, and you'll hear a lot more about this debate. But more importantly, join in with it, find out about it, and prepare to make some changes in your business approach to catch this wave.
Technorati Tags : SaaS, Business 2.0, Web 2.0, ASP, debate, cluetrain, AccountingWEB

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Data Disasters - it shouldn't be so funny

2006-01-13T00:21:00.000Z

I was talking to an accountant today about the rather superb security model that one of my company's SaaS solutions provides. Sadly, she admitted that, as a sole practioner, although her systems are regularly backed up, the copies are only stored at her house, and so if a fire struck, apart from the personal tragedy, her business would be deep in it. Sadly this is too common a story, and there are plenty of small, or even medium size businesses who don't have a good strategy in place - see UK Small Businesses risking disaster. Our SaaS solution works from a secure data centre near Amsterdam, has the data backed off and put in a secure fireproof safe every 6 hours, and once every 24 hours the data is encrypted and transmitted to 2 separate locations in the USA - the kind of superb, high end recovery solution you get from the 1:many economies of scale provided by the SaaS model.

But I'm surprised that there isn't a general web based backup solution aimed at the small business and SOHO type user that is taking the market by storm. I've seen services, tried them, but then been frustrated by the results. I can't understand why there isn't more noise on this topic. On a brighter note, I spotted this PR from Ontrack Data Recovery with their annual Top Ten list of the strangest and funniest computer mishaps in 2005. I was particularly taken by the poor woman dropping the clay pot and almost losing 5 years of work on her book, but I'm not so sure about the cockroaches!
Technorati Tags : SaaS, disaster, recovery, SMB, SOHO

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Is CRM Dead?

2006-01-10T00:45:00.000Z

In a recent AccountingWeb article on what to watch for in 2006, Consultant Editor David Carter suggested:

"The big development that I see coming is the integration of customer relationship management (CRM) into enterprise software. This is likely to be the next big step in the evolution of business software."

I agree with Dennis Howlett's comment on the article, and I just don't see CRM integrated to ERP as the next big thing for the SMB market. The issue is much more complex than that. There is an interesting analysis from Allan Bonde on CIO.com asking if CRM is Dead? Good, controversial title (which I borrowed, thanks Allan), but he is really suggesting that CRM is changing to a version 2 that needs to move beyond call centre, help desk and sales force automation to incorporate new innovations. Quite rightly he points out that:

"Despite its name, one can argue that the greatest shortcoming of CRM is that it never really was about directly helping customers. Solutions were sold to executives running call centres or sales organizations as a way to wring out inefficiency, force standardized processes and gain better insight into the state of the business."

Depressingly, he also mentions:

"several global organizations that have spent more than $100 million on CRM projects and are still uncertain what real value they have received!"

Sadly, we know of many smaller implementations with the same characteristic. But his piece goes on to explain that V2 of CRM might incorporate knowledge management, self service, user forums and other collaboration techniques. He also adds:

"And there is the argument being made by Greg Gianforte at RightNow that on-demand delivery coupled with open source infrastructure may be the most efficient way to bring these types of applications to market, a view that has a lot of merit."

Here is where I completely agree with him. For the SMB market in particular, an open source model works well. It removes one of the major issues in smaller implementations, where the licence or subscription costs are often an inhibitor to rolling the solution out to the whole organisation and partner community. This is certainly an area we will be investigating for our customers in 2006.

Technorati Tags : CRM, ERP, open source, SaaS, Salesforce.com, RightNow, AccountinWeb

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Enterprise IT predictions for 2006

2006-01-07T23:30:00.000Z

In the plethora of 2006 predictions of the last 3 to 4 weeks, did you read Vinnie Mirchandani? If you didn't, please go and read his thoughts now. Good analysis and sound thinking on the bread and butter side of IT.

Technorati Tags : Enterprise IT, ERP, CRM, SaaS, utility computing

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New Media predictions in 2006?

2006-01-07T23:10:00.000Z

While I've been taking a break from writing over the holiday period, I've been reading the many predictions and trends for the coming year, and thinking on the events of the last quarter of 2005. It's clear that there are a number of factors in the shift from traditional media to new media that are accelerating the rate of change, and that means organisations will need to approach their marketing and communications activities in a different way in 2006. It's also clear that the opportunities for using these new factors for guerrilla marketing are expanding, and that's got to be good for small businesses like mine or yours. The blogging phenomenon will become a significant factor in business in the UK, in the way it already is in the USA. I'll be writing more on that in the coming weeks.

Podcasting was big news last year, but was reported more in terms of downloading already published radio material, or a platform for the enthusiast. The ease and cost of production will trigger increasing use of this channel by business and politicians to get their messages across. As an example, just after Christmas in France (which happens to be the second largest blogosphere after the USA), Nicolas Sarkozy, the law-and-order Interior Minister who wants to be their next President, did a podcast for Loïc Le Meur, one of the country's most widely read bloggers. I'd heard of Loic from his involvement at Les Bogs 2.0, and his involvement with Six Apart, and so this move in to politics seems quite unusual. But it has made a big stir over there, with more that 50,000 people accessing the show. It's making the traditional media in France sit up and take notice.

In a world of ever increasing content, the ways we use search will become more important. There will be advances from the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), but you will see additional solutions, like Swicki - see how Dennis Howllett has deployed it at AccMan Pro. For the same reasons, the whole area of information filtering, use of RSS, tracking and web metrics will become much more important, and I hope some better solutions will be developed during the year.

I can also see that online collaboration will become more and more important and more widely used. The Microsoft Live products will become available shortly, and there lots of new, low cost solutions that combine the blog and wicki technology to make a collaborative workspace. As well as the intranet style products, there are a number of shared document and shared spreadsheet solutions available or in beta. You should investigate and start using them today.

I'll be making some suggestions and recommendations on all of these topics, but 2006 is shaping to be an exciting year.

Technorati Tags : Blogging, podcasting, LesBlogs2.0, search, RSS, collaboration, Web2.0

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Daddy, did they have chat rooms when you were a kid?

2005-12-22T09:14:00.000Z

My 12 (going on 19) year old daughter asked me this amazing question over the dinner table last night. Putting aside the rather worrying undercurrent for any parent, it meant I launched in to an impromptu history lesson of computing. I explained to her that most of what she understands as the Internet has really only developed in to the public phenomenon that it now is during her own lifetime. I told her that the closest I got to a computer when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s was in one of my science fiction books. I didn't tell her that my first contact with a computer was at University in the 70s typing 80 column cards on an IBM 029 card punch - that would make me sound like a dinosaur rather than the cool Dad I try to be. I did tell her that in the late 70s and early 80s when my, then, employer (IBM) developed a company wide e-mail system we found it fantastically useful, but didn't seem to mind that we couldn't use it to communicate with anyone in the outside world. I remember, in 1986, cancelling my order for an Amstrad PC because I was fed up with waiting for it, and buying an IBM PC for myself instead for around £3,000 (including the printer) - it sounds such a ridiculously vast sum of money if you take in to account the value of the pound in your pocket back then.

It seems amazing that Tim Berners-Lee only came up with the term World Wide Web and developed the first browser around 1990.

During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes 'World-Wide Web'. I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French.

- Robert Cailliau, A Short History of the Web, 2 November 1995.

To put a different perspective on this, I often think about the world of Star Trek. A 1966 TV programme set in 2263, where people carried personal communicators and hand held computers that they could write on. Doors opened when you got close to them, and you could communicate with the computer by voice commands, as well typing on a keyboard. That computer gave them access to all of the combined knowledge, history, and literature of the world. If you plucked someone from 1966 and brought them to 2005 they would be staggered by how much of that vision exists today, but confused by the fact that we haven't already got a manned base on Mars.

Just as I've been writing this piece I've received a research release from the Center for Media Research. It is a US study, but it says:

About 21 million, or 87% of kids ages 12-17, use the Internet. According to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the Internet have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. The study considers them "Content Creators."

Also, while I've been writing this I've been having an IM conversation simultaneously with my friend Dennis in Spain. He just told me:

We won't see our kids or grandchildren this Xmas so I'll do a podcast mashup - they understand that!

So it is only since the early 90s, when my daughter was born, that most of us have been using the Internet and the web, and the rate of change is truly amazing. Use of Skype, IM, and the Internet arriving on my mobile phone have all really only got off the ground in a mainstream way in the last year or two. The blogosphere and podcasts are upon us, changing the worlds of media, marketing and business, as well as personal life. I expect even greater changes in 2006, which is all very, very exciting.

Right… now I have to go and investigate if some bloke called Jason, who lives near Gatwick, that my daughter met on an Internet game called Runescape is a potential threat or not!
Technorati Tags : Internet, chat, IM, Berners-Lee, history, Star Trek

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Personal productivity tip

2005-12-21T22:36:00.000Z

For the last few months I've been using a neat little program called ActiveWords. It sits between your keyboard and your operating system and allows you to trigger things to happen as you type, to save you time and helps you avoid using the mouse and diving between programs. It can trigger key words to launch applications, it can recognise a key word to open a browser and jump to particular web page, it could capitalise a word or a name, or correct miss-spelled words (a spell checker that works for every program). The action can be triggered by a double space if you want to launch a program, or a space if it is to correct spelling, and you can configure it in a variety of ways. This is one of those things you need to try out to see how many keystrokes and hand movements it will save you. It costs $30/$50 and there is a 60 day free trial. Treat yourself for Christmas.

Technorati Tags : ActiveWords, productivity

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Low cost collaboration tools

2005-12-21T00:46:00.000Z

We often use JotSpot as a very cost effective collaboration tool - an ideal SaaS based intranet. However, I recently sat through a presentation by Neil Darracott of a small company called Xolve, explaining how they use Groove Networks product for project collaboration.

I'd heard of Groove, because of their recent acquisition by Microsoft, but didn't know much about it. This is a different approach to collaboration. You download the tool and it creates a peer to peer link for you between the various computers you or your team use. It allows you to share folders and files between the team, using your normal desktop applications and the Windows Explorer you use now (with an extra button added). If you are working on a file off-line, Groove synchronises it with the other team members the next time you are connected. It costs a one off licence of $69/$179/$229 depending on the features and options you chose.

But on further investigation I discovered Microsoft had also acquired Foldershare, which seems to be the same basic technology as Groove, but is available as a free download - a very cost effective approach to collaboration! These products are going to be components in the forthcoming "Live" products that Microsoft announced recently. It will be worth your while keeping track of them. Marc Olson writes this blog covering the way Groove will be integrated with Office 12.

I still believe the SaaS based approach has significant advantages, but the pricing of these products ,and their integration to MS Office, ought to make a number of the current collaboration tool vendors just a little uneasy!
Technorati Tags : SaaS, collaboration, Goove, Foldershare, intranets, Live, Microsoft

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It's that predictable time of year

2005-12-20T23:58:00.000Z

I still continue to be surprised at the number of people I talk to in the IT and software world who haven't properly woken up to the new wave of Software as a Service and Open Source, and the effects they are producing. IDC's predictions for 2006 have them at the heart of things:

"A critical new ingredient we'll see in 2006 is the acceleration of disruptive business models – 'open innovation' in IT product and service development (the open source effect) and online delivery of IT as a service (the Google effect). These disruptive shifts will force most vendors to perform a strategic gut check as they enter the year," said Frank Gens, senior vice president of Research.

I see they feature in Dennis Howlett's accounting world view of the coming year. And the SaaS and Utility computing topics are being mentioned pretty regularly in a variety of media spots - see the following random selection:

Managing Automation

IT Jungle

VNUnet

Tekrati

The "stone age" software types better wake up in the new year.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, utility, 2006, predictions, IDC

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What not to do

2005-12-09T16:46:00.000Z

After he sold his business to Hasbro, serial entrepreneur John Osher decided to make a list of the 16 mistakes he'd made or seen other entrepreneurs make in business. It has since been expanded to 17 and he added 5 things you must do to succeed. It has become a case study used in the standard curriculum at Harvard Business School. When I found it and read it recently in this Entrepreneur.com article, I thought that many of the points, like so many ideas in good management textbooks, were either obvious or common sense. However, in the heat of the battle, when you are under fire from all sides, sometimes you miss the obvious. It is worth taking a few minutes out of the busy schedule to remind yourself of these things. The important ones for me were:

"Mistake 11: Accepting that it's "not possible" too easily rather than finding a way"

"Mistake 12: Focusing too much on sales volume and company size rather than profit."

"Mistake 15: Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose."

Particularly this last one of clarity. Sometimes the objectives you set for the business can take over from your objectives for starting the business in the first place.

Technorati Tags : entrepreneur, business, strategy., Harvard

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Can you Digg it?

2005-12-06T09:31:00.000Z

Here is an example of how blogging, posting, RSS feeds and social media are changing the way news media works. I've just found Digg, which is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With Digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users themselves do. This an intriguing concept in web based democracy, where anyone can contribute, and an editorial collective (of people like us) votes on how prominently the story is featured. And Digg have just announced that they are moving in to broader categories, beyond just technology. Definitely a site and a concept worth watching.

Technorati Tags : blogging, technology, news, Web2.0, Digg

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UK Small Businesses risking disaster

2005-11-30T15:29:00.000Z

A while ago, when my own PC disk starting making weird noises I asked "is it safe?" I just saw a BT and IoD report published earlier this month that suggests:

"Less than 20 per cent of UK small businesses backup their data remotely, even though 82 per cent admit they could not function without it"

Professor Jim Norton, Senior Policy Adviser at the IoD, said: “For smaller businesses in particular, the owner/manager is in charge of IT. “As a result, things like backing up data are way down the list of priorities and are often seen as chores. This is because traditional backup methods, like tape or CD are often time consuming. But times have changed, and backup now requires little or no input from users.”

The report also reminds us that having a backup isn't the only requirement, as backup tapes or CDs kept on site can be easily corrupted should a disaster such as a flood or fire strike. Just to make things more worrying, the London Prepared website suggests that 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut within 2 years. I've seen other reports that suggest the figure is 70%, but let's not split hairs.

One aspect of SaaS solutions is that "best in class" off-site backup comes as part of the subscription price - another reason why you should be giving them serious consideration. But SaaS may not cover all of your systems, and you'll probably have a lot of other data and documents in and around your systems. There are a growing number of online backup solutions available. As well as the BT service mentioned in their report, a quick Google search of "online backup" gives a list for your consideration, with charges starting in the range of £2-5 per Gb of storage per month. I'd suggest this is worthy of some of your time to investigate, and I'd be interested if anybody has any experience they'd like to share. But the maxim has got to be "prepare for the worst, hope for the best".

Technorati Tags : SaaS, backup, disaster, recovery, business

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Help with the dreaded Cold Calling

2005-11-29T08:37:00.000Z

For most people in business the toughest part of finding new business is cold calling, and that includes seasoned (don't I mean old?) sales professionals. I screwed up on one yesterday where I temporarily forgot the cardinal rule, which is to always put yourself in the other guys/gals shoes. It always helps to prepare and take advice. Here is a good article on the topic from Business 2.0 magazine, and another one from Buzzle.com.

Technorati Tags : business, development, cold, calling

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Any advance on Web 2.0?

2005-11-28T18:26:00.000Z

One of the key themes of this website is the impact of Web 2.0 on business. The term is useful shorthand, applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of static websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. However, I've noticed a worrying trend in the US where the label is being applied to various companies with a touch of marketing hype rather than reality. But worse, I've seen a conference on Web 2.1, and if you do a Google search on Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 you'll get an alarmingly large number of hits. Oh dear - I hope this doesn't generate too much confusion.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0

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E-mail Is So 5 Minutes Ago

2005-11-27T21:09:00.000Z

I saw this excellent article on Business Week online (registration site, but free). It describes how Darren Lennard, the managing director in the London offices of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, after a long and onerous day at the office:

"plucked his hyperactive BlackBerry from his silk-lined pocket and proceeded to smash it on the gleaming granite countertop of his London home."

Nice image - some of us may know what he feels like! The article goes on to explain that, of the 250 e-mails he received each day 85% were totally not important to his job. Dresdner are now ditching e-mail in favour of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time); blogs (like this one - chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft SharePoint or other collaboration tools which allow workers to create Web sites for a teams' use on projects. The article suggests that organisations like Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak, Yahoo!, and even the U.S. military are following suit.

More forward thinking organisations have been using these sorts of collaboration tools for a while in place of chasing e-mail trails. However, it's good to see the concepts getting mainstream airtime.
Technorati Tags : e-mail, blackberry, wiki, blog, IM, intranets, collaboration

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Software sales model shifts

2005-11-27T20:24:00.000Z

Regular readers will know that the shift from the traditional licenced software business model to Software as a Service is a common topic with me. Dennis Howlett pointed me at this ZDNet article, which speaks for itself.

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Business Process Innovation and Social Networks

2005-11-27T20:06:00.000Z

I've just discovered Irving Wladasky-Berger's blog. He's the VP of technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM. He's written an interesting piece about a breakfast roundtable he attended in Palo Alto on Social Media and Web 2.0 hosted by Tony Perkins, founder and former editor-in-chief of Red Herring. It also relates to the debate about business process outsourcing from earlier posts here. You should read it. He says that:

"with the emergence of Service-Oriented Architectures, Web Services and similar capabilities we can now tackle the standardization and integration of business processes and truly contemplate building globally integrated businesses, industries and economies."

He goes on to comment:

"An innovative business looks for the proper balance between process – covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated – and people – who bring their creativity and adaptability to handle everything else. In a world that keeps getting more and more complicated and is changing faster and faster you need both – but even more, you need the innovation which, when all is said and done, is the truly human element."

Technorati Tags : Business, process, innovation, social, media, web2.0

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How to network

2005-11-26T23:09:00.000Z

I've only just discovered Real Business magazine. Here's some great advice on Networking.

Technorati Tags : Business, networking

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The Elevator pitch

2005-11-26T22:35:00.000Z

An "Elevator Pitch" is a concise, carefully planned, and well-practiced description about your company that your mother should be able to understand in the time it would take to ride up an elevator. While I was thinking about improving mine, I found this resource on perfecting your pitch by Bill Joos. He preaches the art of the pitch for Garage.com a venture-capital investment bank that's helped more than 60 startups raise a total of $200 million since 1999.

Technorati Tags : Marketing, elevator, pitch

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Old ERP and outsourcing vs. small is beautiful

2005-11-26T21:41:00.000Z

Vinnie Mirchandani has written an interesting piece called Business Process "Angioplasty", that has been commented on by Dennis Howlett, and within a few hours I read about Sainsbury's giving up on Accenture and insourcing their IT back home. Vinnie's argument is that the move to major brand ERP solutions in the 90s, supported or recommended by the big consultancies, wasn't doing anything clever in re-engineering the organisation's processes, and was providing just the same old transactions with a different user interface and database. He says:

"Implement it and magically you became "world class" was the thinking. It would get you Toyota's Lean and GE's Six Sigma - without the discipline and the investment. It was a fad diet. After ERP, we moved to SCM, CRM and other business applications."

Dennis asks if they were:

"selling snake oil?"

In Sainsbury's case the report suggests they outsourced their IT to a partner that seems to have had the appropriate expertise to manage the systems and infrastructure, but not enough understanding of either retail or the Sainsbury's business itself. These all echo other stories we've heard of major IT projects that have gone astray. But Vinnie's article has some important positive points. He says:

"As I have written throughout my blog, "tiger teams" are showing huge payback from small, creative technology deployments. On the other hand, the payback from large enterprise applications in many cases has been questionable."

He spends a lot of time discussing business process outsourcing, culminating in the these words:

"Having seen IT outsourcing for 2 decades, I firmly believe in the adage "make a process efficient before you outsource". With many business processes so broken just handing over to BPO provider will not magically fix them."

So what I draw from this is that big bang project implementations should be avoided and that small is beautiful.

This is another indication of how the Software as a Service based solution's time has come. The SaaS approach always starts from a small pilot, or "tiger team" approach, which is proven to work before the solution is rolled out to a wider audience. The SaaS solution providers are also starting from the commoditised application areas, like accounting - we know how the debits and credits need to work. The processes around how they need to be managed and reported, either for the client or the accountant, are relatively straightforward. And unlike the Sainsbury's example, you are outsourcing the application and infrastructure management to a specialist 3rd party to relieve the IT headache, whilst retaining control of the business process and the data yourself. That will avoid the snake oil or the need for angioplasty.
Technorati Tags : SaaS, implementation, outsourcing, BPO, ERP

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Sage research points to SaaS and better use of technology

2005-11-25T08:50:00.000Z

Dennis Howlett tipped me off to an excellent piece of research carried out by YouGov and Launchpad Research for Sage, which analyses the responses from 486 accountants and 2301 businesses about the relationship between businesses and their accountant. You must go and download/read the full report, but some key sentences which jump out:

55 per cent of businesses felt that the working relationship with their accountant could be improved.
81 per cent of accountants believe that they can use technology to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the services they provide.
A third of businesses believe accountants can make better use of technology to increase the effectiveness of the service they offer.
36 per cent of businesses and 37 per cent of accountants would use a hosted service if it meant that data could be shared more effectively between the two.

Some of the other frustrations listed in the report were to do with arguments over fees, and communication issues on both sides.

Firstly, this highlights that use of Software as a Service solutions to share data between the business advisor and the client is already in the minds of a significant proportion of the audience on both sides. The second point is that effective use of new technology can affect many of the communication issues raised here, whether it is use of CRM, practice management, extranets, document management or blogging. As with anything to do with marketing and business development, the keys are relationship building combined with effective dialogue in all areas of the business. Those companies that start to review these areas, move away from the traditional software approaches, and look for cost effective ways they can improve their interaction with their customer and business partner communities will be the ones who succeed.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, marketing, business, communications, CRM.

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Timeout - consider starting a blog today!

2005-11-23T10:53:00.000Z

Use of the Internet gives an armoury of weapons for guerrilla marketing tactics for the small to medium business. It is the key factor in the rise of the number of small businesses being created, but more importantly succeeding. These days, you wouldn't think of starting a business without a phone, a fax and a website. But what about the rise of the blog? I think if you move the clock forward a few years, a company blog, or one written by the business owner/leader will be a normal, essential part of the marketing mix that will be in the plan without thinking about it. I would suggest that you take time out of your busy schedule today and take some steps to starting one, so your organisation can be ahead of the curve. If you've already started one, take some time to see how you could improve it.

The key thing about the concept is that it is a dynamic conversation with your target audience. You get your message and ideas across in a way that the more static pages of your website don't do, and it invites feedback from your audience. It doesn't have to cost very much, and you could even get started by using free tools like Blogger. It will only cost you the time and effort to come up with the ideas, do the writing, and be disciplined enough to keep the content flowing. However, if your passionate about your business, I'd be very surprised if you don't have enough material coming at you day to day that you'd like to comment on or use to emphasise your message. You could even hire a specialist copywriter - contact me for some suggestions.

Obviously there are key things to get right, and mistakes you can make, and I'll be putting together some dos and don'ts, and pointers to resources to help over the next few days. By coincidence Dennis Howlett, who inspired me on this topic in the first place, put a related piece on his blog last night. This is part of the beauty of this media, because there will always be useful materials you can cross reference to reinforce your message. His item confirms that his AccMan Pro blog is working, generating business for him.

Note: I thought the cartoon was appropriate on the rise of the blog. I don't know the author, but I found it here on PrawfsBlawg.
Technorati Tags : Marketing, blogging, Internet, business, Web2.0

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White Papers with grubby edges

2005-11-22T10:25:00.000Z

I don't know about you, but I'm fed up with some organisation's attitudes to "white papers". I regularly download white papers on a variety of topics, or to find out about what my competitors are doing and thinking. Some are extremely good, but some examples I've downloaded recently from AccountingWEB campaigns and elsewhere have been little more than recycled sales collateral, with very little real content, or just a taster of an idea, where you need to get further in to the sales cycle with that company before you get the real answers.

I'm convinced that well written white papers should be part of your marketing strategy. However, you need to be confident enough to provide a good message and information on the topic, and trust that your audience will see you've got expertise in that area, and be compelled to pick up the phone, e-mail, or make contact with you. My business partner and I have just written a series of white papers on issues around our business, and we pride ourselves that they provide interesting ideas and pointers to good reference sources - so far audience reaction has been very positive.

Thankfully we did a reasonable job based on our experience, but here is a good article I wish I'd read first, with advice on this topic that you should read: How to Write Compelling White Papers (Your Audience Will Really Want to Read).
Technorati Tags : marketing, white, papers, compelling

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Software's Eve of Destruction

2005-11-20T18:17:00.000Z

I've been one of several contributors to an interesting debate with Paul Stobart, CEO of Sage, on the Software as a Service (SaaS) topic in the pages of AccountingWEB. In the latest instalment Stobart denied that there was any great complexity in offering software as a service and argued, "The debate goes way beyond hosting. ASP/on-demand/SaaS is really a red herring to what's really going on". The rest of us have been arguing that SaaS isn't just an alternative delivery mechanism, certainly isn't a red herring, but is a major shift that traditional software houses will ignore at their peril. So it was interesting to read this piece by Kevin Kellerher on TheStreet.com. Read the full article, but some key quotes are:

"The whole software industry is being disrupted by the software-as-a-service approach," says Gordon Ritter, an Emergence partner and a former vice president at IBM. Ritter says that the rise of Salesforce.com came shortly before the decline of Siebel, and its subsequent purchase by Oracle -- and it's no coincidence.

"Salesforce.com is taking down Siebel and pulling biz from it. You have a giant coming to its knees with a start-up disrupting them with a better value proposition," Ritter says. "We see new entrants coming in with this software-as-a-service approach. We see a giant industry with disruptive forces hitting it."

I was also interested to hear this article refer to "creative destruction", the expression used by economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe his view of the process of industrial transformation that accompanies radical innovation.

In the AccountingWEB article Stobart also said "For people to say we haven't thought through the implications is doing us a disservice". I would guess that he does realise the disruptive forces that are at work, but can't say too much because of the various constituencies he has to keep happy. Dennis Howlett has done a good piece on the cash crunch for Sage in making the business model switch. Any traditional software company is going to be hard pressed to make the necessary changes to their model, stay profitable, and keep their original customer base and reseller community happy. These are definitely both creative and destructive times for the software industry, and it can only provide better value for the customer as the new order is established.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, ASP, Sage, Siebel, Salesforce, business, marketing

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Help with Wikipedia

2005-11-20T16:56:00.000Z

Are you, like me, a regular user of Wikipedia as your favourite reference site? If so, then this article Ten Wikipeda Hacks might help you get more out the experience. I like the AJAX search, the use of A9 to search Google and Wikipedia together, and I hadn't found the printable article tool. Very useful.
Technorati Tags : Wikipedia, AJAX

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Getting Things Done

2005-11-18T23:47:00.000Z

Here's a suggestion on personal productivity. Around 25 years ago I was handed the Time Manager system at IBM, and I've been carrying organisers and using various different approaches ever since. I find that every couple of years I need to change system, and read a good book on the topic to re-vitalise my ideas and shake things up. Recently I'm a convert to David Allen's Getting Things Done. I recommend reading the book, the first line of which is "It's possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control."

The diagram gives you a flavour of the approach, but one of the keys is that this system makes you deal with all that amorphous stuff that is bouncing around in your head and causing you grief at night. Other ingredient's are the "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" approach to emptying your in tray, and a 2 minute rule on deciding what to do now and what to defer.

There are many fervent evangelists for the approach, which can be a little off-putting, but they've created some useful tools that you can find with a quick Google search. My own personal system uses a combination of my Time & Chaos PIM, use of note flags in MS OneNote (my main vehicle for note taking) and lots of manila folders. Whichever tools you decide to use, get the book, and give yourself an injection of organisation.

Technorati Tags : GTD, productivity, time, management

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SaaS, integration and AppExchange

2005-11-18T06:17:00.000Z

One of the keys to success in adoption of Software as a Service will be ease of integration between web services. Of course this has always been an IT issue, with users choosing either an ERP style path, or "best of breed" applications. This is balancing a compromise on functionality versus the support and cost issues of integration.

Salesforce.com is endeavouring to avoid going the way of Siebel in their sector by approaching this issue with their AppExchange. When they announced it a few months ago they likened it to the eBay and the iTunes of applications. iTunes is an interesting comparison, but I'm not sure eBay is a particularly positive example. The idea will definitely foster an ecosystem of add-on and complimentary applications, but I can't see that large volumes of software vendors will want to adopt the Salesforce technology platform as their foundation, in the way that they did with Microsoft to build client/server applications. Other SaaS vendors are taking an open source style approach to extend their product, like JotSpot encouraging developers to create add-on applications for the whole customer community.

However, the better SaaS offerings will use SOAP, XML and good design to make it easy for customers to take the "best of breed" approach without the integration overhead that we had to live with using client/server applications.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, integration, ERP, Salesforce, AppExchange

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Stone Age vendors

2005-11-18T05:15:00.000Z

I attended a NetSuite webinar yesterday called "How to manage a Software as a Service business". It was interesting, but more an advert for how you could use NetSuite to run a SaaS business than offering innovative ideas and insights on the topic. However, the main presenter kept contrasting SaaS companies like NetSuite and Salesforce.com with "the stone age vendors like Sage". Far be it from me to describe the traditional vendors in such disparaging terms, but it did make me chuckle!

Technorati Tags : SaaS, traditional, NetSuite, Salesforce

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(ya)Hoo are the World's top 10 websites?

2005-11-16T12:24:00.000Z

I just read an interesting piece from the excellent Richard MacManus blog on ZDNet. He's listed the top 10 sites by visitor traffic as recorded by Alexa, and it shows some interesting things:

1.   Yahoo!
2.   Microsoft Network (MSN)
3.   Google
4.   Yahoo! Japan
5.   Baidu.com
6.   sina.com
7.   EBay
8.   Passport.net
9.   sohu.com
10. 163.com

I find it surprising that Yahoo and MSN are ahead of Google, but what shouldn't be so surprising is that 4 of the top 10 are Chinese sites - Baidu.com is China's leading search engine. Read more of his story here.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, search, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Alexa, traffic

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Instant Intranets with Web 2.0

2005-11-16T06:40:00.000Z

Over the last few months we have been in the set up phase of a new business partnership with a particular software author, with other agents in various parts of Europe at a similar stage of development. I had been badgering the author to set up a partner intranet for us to facilitate communication and cooperation, but the author was more interested in getting on with their own developments - probably a good thing!

At our last partner meeting I decided to take the issue on myself. It was on a Wednesday that I volunteered to create a partner intranet by the following Monday. I decided to use JotSpot, the wiki based intranet company started by Joe Kraus. I signed up, decided on my subscription level, and spent a couple of hours on the Sunday morning creating some structure to the site - pages on useful documentation, contracts, sales campaign ideas, a contacts directory, FAQs by topic, etc. None of the 2 hours was anything technical, only content creation. One of the beauties of the Jot wiki approach is that it's as easy to use as Word, but goes beyond standard content management systems and allows easy creation of a new page with a special word style. Everyone has access to the facility, which fosters collaboration, and JotSpot has full version control so if anyone makes a mistake, or writes something we decide isn't helpful, we just roll back to the previous version of that page. I can store any documents and files too.

Jotspot also has a library of plug-in applications, and nice features, like the ability to e-mail content to any page. It is an ideal example of how the Web 2.0 and Software as a Service phenomenon is providing really practical and useful tools for business, if you know where to look. We now have a working intranet, that was created in a few hours, was useful from day one, and costs us $9 a month for our community of 20 users . You can try the service out for free at JotSpot.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, SaaS, intranets, wiki, JotSpot

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Management visionary Peter Drucker dies at 95

2005-11-14T06:26:00.000Z

The preeminent business philosopher, Peter Drucker, died last Friday at the age of 95. Harvard Business Review called him the father of modern management and he published more than 40 books over 60 years, including The Practice of Management in 1954, and continued to write, contribute, and consult well in to his 90s. Drucker challenged business and labour leaders to find ways to give workers more control over their work environment. He also argued that governments should turn many functions over to private enterprise.

Many of us will have read his ideas and words, but I am indebted to Phil Wainewright for his piece on ZDNet where he talks about a prophetic 1996 interview Drucker did for Wired magazine. In it he likened the IT industry to the birth of the printing industry in the 15th century, where the early printers became great stars as the industry flourished. Later in the next century though, these men who focused on the technology had become mere craftsmen, and the emphasis and plaudits had shifted to what we now call publishers. Wainewright goes on:

"This is the historical precedent for what we now see happening in IT with the emergence of on-demand services, in which the emphasis passes from those who sell software and the tools to run software (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) to those who sell new views on data and information (Google, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com and hundreds of other on-demand providers). It's not the technology that matters, it's what you do with it that counts."

Technorati Tags : Drucker, business, management, information, Web2.0

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SaaS is creating a storm for traditional software vendors

2005-11-11T11:04:00.000Z

I've seen, been quoted in and contributed to a number of posts on the Software as a Service topic recently. With Microsoft's latest announcement, SaaS will begin to become a mainstream application option for general business, but there is still a lot of confusion out there over what it is, as well as company's changing to a SaaS style pricing model, when really there is a lot more to it than just delivering an existing client/server application on a hosted platform. Actually the concept isn't new. In 1961 the respected Computer Scientist John McCarthy was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). It's just that technology has caught up to implement a great idea properly.

This IDC diagram explains some of the issues:

On the left we have the vendors with an existing client/server application designed for a one-to-one or one-to-few interaction, which they are endeavoring to deliver in Application Server Provider (ASP) style. This is either hosted from their own hardware or with an outsource partner, and web enabled with, maybe CITRIX or Terminal Server. They have to tackle the licencing issues of the original product and change their pricing model, but there is much more to SaaS than that.

On the right you have the true SaaS vendors, who have architected their product for the Internet and web services from the ground up, so that one-to-many is built in to the design. These vendors get the real performance, scalabilty and usability benefits. But even then, that is only part of this story.

For the traditional vendor the move to SaaS is a complete change of business model. When IBM announced, earlier this year, some special programs to support ISVs in making the switch Dave Mitchell, director of SaaS at IBM, said:

"From a business perspective, a company needs to think about revenue recognition, compensation for your sales force, routes to market, and distribution channels. From a technical side, companies have to consider service delivery, billing, and user support."

From a June press release, Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource said:

"To make the transition to SaaS, software companies need to develop a new discipline around operational services, and it just isn't in their DNA. As a result, there is an ecosystem of SaaS enablers that has arisen, to help software companies deploy and implement SaaS."

Ryan's company is part of that ecosystem, along with others like ServePath and Sandhill. So if there's money to be made in assisting vendors make the transition, it must be a difficult prospect. There's a storm coming!

Whether it is a company the size of Microsoft, or a smaller mid-range vendor, many of the current players won't manage the transition. They would do better to start a new subsidiary with a different brand identity and the SaaS mentality embedded in the "DNA" of that company from day one.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, ASP, Microsoft, outsourcing, Live, business, marketing, branding

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Meme Time (rhymes with Dream time)

2005-11-09T15:16:00.000Z

I've seen the word meme in a lot of my web 2.0 research recently, and even faux-meme. Now I'm not too proud to admit that this was one of those words where I knew what it meant, but couldn't have verbalised a definition or the history. So I decided to look it up. I now know that Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins is credited with first publication of the concept of meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection. If you want to find out more, check out Meme Central.

Technorati Tags : Meme, Dawkins, ideas, genes, Web2.0

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Capture the Imagination

2005-11-07T07:36:00.000Z

I took my kids to the Science of Aliens exhibition at the Science Museum in London the other day, and I was reminded of the power, and importance of capturing your audience's imagination. One of the exhibits, Zone 3 - Almost beyond imagination, had a distinct WOW factor with all of the people around me. This is where the museum, with the help of Channel 4 and Big Wave Productions challenged some of the brightest and best scientific minds to imagine life on alien worlds. But their way of getting the message across was what made the difference, with a creative use of the same technology as interactive whiteboards or interactive projectors.

This zone has a series of tables, with the alien world projected on them from above. Strange creatures stalk about amongst the planet's landscape. You touch one, and a tabbed window opens up with pictures and information. As you page through learning about the alien's habits, there is still a link back to your alien, prowling around, exhibiting the behaviour or adaptation that you are just reading about on the tab - say hunting other people's aliens! Now the interesting thing here is that, from a technology point of view, this is nothing special. The interactive projector technology exists in many schools and colleges. The graphics programming must be pretty rudimentary when compared to the stuff my son buys for his Playstation 2. But the application of the technology in this environment made the subject matter seductive. The combination of novelty, fun and simplicity of the approach meant that the audience was reading and learning about the subject, in a way that wasn't happening with the static display cards elsewhere in the exhibition.

I think you'll begin to see more of this type of presentation, particularly for exhibitions, or at point of sale. I found this company, arcstreamav, who has applied the idea to projecting on the floor for advertising. Take a look at this page on their site, as it has a nice video showing the principle rather nicely. However, the key lesson for me is not the technology, but the message itself. Wherever you are trying to get your message across, there will be standard technology that you can apply that might cost a little more in time and effort, but will help you capture your audience's imagination much more effectively than just the words on the page (screen or display card). The trick is to take a step back and think differently.

Technorati Tags : marketing, technology, design

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Are Open Source databases more secure?

2005-11-05T01:41:00.000Z

Open Source Software is gaining acceptance, particularly in the arena of infrastructure and development platforms. Many medium and large corporations have a growing number of Linux implementations, the Open Source operating system started as a project at the University of Helsinki in 1991 by the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds. More often than not this is because it was the cheapest way for IT to develop test systems, and then the usage has grown from the test environment to operational systems, but the pace has increased as the platform has been embraced by major suppliers like Dell Computers and IBM .

Interest is growing in Open Source databases and security is a large part of the reason why, according to a recent US survey by Evans Data. While 85 percent of the 400 companies surveyed said proprietary database servers were compromised at least once in the last year, only 9 percent of those using open source databases reported the same. The study also finds that use of MySQL, the popular open source database, increased over 25 percent in the last six months and that 44 percent of developers are now using it. Interestingly, the suggestion is that the open source community can respond more quickly to vulnerabilities than can developers of proprietary software. Factors like these are only going to increase the pace of adoption when they come to the attention of safety conscious senior executives.

Technorati Tags : OSS, open, source, technology, Linux, IBM, MySQL

Is Skype really worth $4.1 bn?

2005-11-04T23:50:00.000Z

Now Skype is a great product. I use it myself on a daily basis, and there is a growing community of us - 179 million downloads so far! People are beginning to put their Skype ID on their business cards.

Having worked for traditional, well managed software companies, who slug it out year on year and produce healthy, regular profits of, say, 10%, but see their share price remain in a relatively steady state, I am constantly amazed at the valuation of some new technology companies. Like many I saw the headline number for eBay buying Skype last month at $2.6 bn without really thinking about it. But this is product which most of us download and use for free, and some pay modest amounts for extra services like voicemail and Skype Out to call external numbers at very cheap rates. Skype's estimated revenue for 2005 is $60 million, up from $7 million in 2004. How do these numbers work for eBay? But it gets even more interesting. Most will have missed the fact that, if certain performance targets are met, eBay said it would pay an additional $1.5bn to Skype over the next three years. What do the management at Skype have to do from a starting point of $60m revenue this year for the next three years to get the $1.5bn bonus? I know a few sales guys who would fancy that commission plan.

Now the usual rules of brand marketing will apply, and although Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have jumped on board with equivalent products, Skype are there first in the mind of us consumers. But is Skype worth that much? I don't believe we have entered a bubble era like the Dot.com boom, but the web 2.0 world will occasionally throw up big winners like this.

Technorati Tags : Skype, voip, eBay, technology, valuation

Is Microsoft nailed to it's perch?

2005-11-03T23:31:00.000Z

Last month Microsoft reorganised in to 3 divisions. Analysts predicted this move was a bulwark against Google, and that it signalled an accelerated commitment to hosted-software services. Tuesday's announcement from Bill Gates is the result, and it said that it is more important than the .NET announcement of 5 years ago, or even the Internet Explorer announcements of 10 years ago that put Microsoft head to head with Netscape in the browser wars. I would suggest that it is at least as important as these things, and I agree with the many that also suggest that the announcement will have major implications on the future of Microsoft, and not in a positive way! The key thing that it does do is legitimise the movement towards Software as a Service (SaaS), as well as "free" Open Source Software. Although Microsoft is following in the footsteps of Salesforce.com, Google, Yahoo and a host of smaller providers, this move from the giant will put the SaaS concept on the map for the general business community. Amazingly, some analysts, like Drew Brosseau of SG Cowen, suggest that this is a positive move for Microsoft because of the extra revenue streams addressed by Windows Live and Office Live. I just don't see that. I agree with the likes of Dennis Howlett and others who see the conflict this move is going to cause between these offerings aimed at the consumer and the small business, and the existing licence revenue from the corporate sector, as well as the VAR community who live off their slice of that revenue. What's in this announcement for them? How is the rest of Microsoft going to move from a business model based on licence sales to one based on subscriptions and advertising. There are other factors too. Windows Live overlaps with the current MSN and so some of the revenues generated won't be incremental, they will actually come from displacing existing MSN revenues. And will users flock to the new services in droves?

Windows Live does not seem to be anything new:

Live.com serves as the personalized starting point for Windows Live services - but isn't that like my Google or Yahoo tailored home page?Windows Live Mail is a new, global Web email service. No it's not, it's just the next version of MSN Mail and just another choice from Gmail and Yahoo Mail.Windows Live Messenger provides instant messaging, file and photo sharing, PC-based calling and more. Or in other words an upgrade from MSN Messenger to catch up with Yahoo, Flickr and Skype.Windows Live Safety Center is a Web site where users can scan for and remove viruses from their PC on demand. Isn't that like MacAfee or Norton?Windows OneCare Live, a PC health subscription that helps protect and maintain PCs via an integrated service that includes anti-virus, firewall, PC maintenance, and data backup and restore capability. More of the same Norton and MacAfee, plus backup like Storegate or Connected.comWindows Live Favourites is a service that enables individuals to access their Microsoft Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer favourites from any PC that's online. Yes, just like I already do with Yahoo MyWeb, or Del.icio.us.

Office Live at least has some potential:

Office Live Basics helps a small business establish an online Internet presence including a domain name, a Web site with 30 MB of storage and five Web email accounts at no charge through an advertising-supported model. Office Live also provides a set of subscription-based services with more than 20 business applications to help automate daily business tasks such as project management, sales and collateral management, customer management, expense reports, time and billing management, and secure internal and external collaboration - all built on Windows SharePoint Services. So we have some old, some new, and some threats to the current crop of collaboration, document management and CRM tools, but nothing you could call dramatic.

Tell me - how is all of is this going to produce revenues dramatic enough to replace the drop in both corporate and mid sized licence revenues? How are the MS VARS going to survive as this accelerates the move from traditional towards SaaS based solutions from all suppliers, not just Microsoft? At the moment I can't see this as anything but the start of a slow and steady decline for Microsoft. It could take quite a while, but how soon before we have an ex-Microsoft on our hands?

Technorati Tags : SaaS., Web2.0, Microsoft, Office, Windows, Live, Salesforce.com, Google, Yahoo

Take a look at Microsoft "Live"

2005-11-02T05:40:00.000Z

More about what Windows Live is here.

The beta of Windows Live can be found here.

You can sign up for Office Live, to be released Q1 2006, here.

The key slide from Bill Gate's presentation that explains Microsoft's new view of the world is here. Thanks to Niall Kennedy.

Technorati Tags : Microsoft, Web2.0, Windows, Office, Live

Microsoft embraces Software as a Service with "Live"

2005-11-02T05:09:00.000Z

Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie announced yesterday a major shift in Microsoft strategy towards web based applications supported by advertising and subscription business models. More analysis from Business Two Zero will follow, but first some of the facts. These words from Eric Auchard at Reuters (or read the full story):

Outlining what it said was its biggest strategy shift in five years, the Redmond, Washington company told a meeting of analysts and reporters that it would deliver many of its key products and services as online services as well as selling subscriptions or licenses for software installed on computers.Windows Live and Office Live will give users some of the basic features of the software giant's two most-profitable products, but without the complexity of installing and maintaining the software in computer hard drives."We are trying to put a 'services plus software' mentality into many many of the product groups inside Microsoft," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect.Microsoft also said it planned to fold many well-known products in its MSN division into a new brand called Windows Live. The move will combine its instant-messaging service, a new online e-mail service replacing Hotmail, Web security, data storage and other features, all available via the Internet.The software giant is looking to defend its mainstay Windows and Office software franchises by borrowing from ideas used by challengers such as Google, Salesforce.com, WebEx, Yahoo Inc. and scores of start-ups.
Analysts attending the meeting said Microsoft demonstrated it clearly grasps how the industry is shifting to deliver software as Web-based services rather than isolated programs. But these moves are preliminary and fragmentary, they said.The new initiative also reflects a recent company-wide reorganization at Microsoft that put MSN under the Windows division and put Ozzie in charge of Microsoft's efforts to deliver software services over the Web.

These words from Yardena Arar, live from the event on Today @ PC World:

Now he's talking about Windows Live and Office Live. The former, Windows Live, is not Windows. Rather, it's "Internet based personal services to bring together your digital world." But Windows Live isn't MSN.com either. It sounds basically like a new Web portal.Office Live sounds similar, but business focused and easy to integrate with Microsoft Office (but you don't need Office to use Office Live). Some of these Live services will be free, others will be subscription-based. Gates explained that the Live platform will help Microsoft deliver a broad range of technologies to users.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, Web2.0, On-Demand, Windows, Office, Live

Solutions - traditional, sassy or sweet?

2005-11-01T18:56:00.000Z

One of my business partners is in the process of implementing a new CRM solution. While I was debating with them the merits of the particular solution they've chosen, I started to think about the technology choices available to the organisation today. For most application areas we are beyond the make-or-buy decision, as there is a huge choice ofstandard offerings, but there are two major technology shifts that mean the buy choice can fall in to 3 categories. They are traditional licenced software, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS).

Historically, companies were required to buy, build, and maintain their own IT infrastructures despite exponential costs. Even a small business with a few PCs needs to find somebody in their organisation to take on the role of the IT Manager – to install the applications, manage the new versions that come from the author at regular intervals, to make sure the systems and data are regularly backed up and stored securely off-site, to think about a disaster recovery plan – all the necessary technical and management issues that can rise to a significant overhead in any company and need a large team in bigger organisations. Software as a Service effectively redefines the software deployment model from packaged applications with upfront licensing fees and lengthy implementations to one that constitutes a dynamic, “pay-as-you-go” Internet delivered service relationship. This shift fundamentally changes the assumptions, relationships, partnerships, and value proposition between software vendors, clients & end-users, and third-party service providers.

According to an AMR Research study, over 80% of CRM software deployments either fail to add value, encounter significant adoption issues among end-users, or fail outright. Maybe this is why Salesforce.com is one of the companies at the forefront of the new wave of SaaS providers. An SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) and Tripletree report last year showed a comparison between two successful CRM projects for 500 user systems. The traditional approach with Siebel cost $8.8m, whilst the new approach with Salesforce.com cost just over $1m. Although the difference will be less pronounced for smaller projects, the payback for a SaaS CRM system is typically in the 3 to 6 month timeframe, compared to 12 to 18 months with the traditional approach.

But the situation is complicated, in a good way, by the possibility of a third option - the OSS route. An option to compare with Siebel and Salesforce.com is an open source company called SugarCRM. They have a typical business model for this field. You can download the free version of the software, and tap in to the development community and message boards for help and advice, or even track down some consulting help from the community or SugarCRM themsleves. In this instance, I have a business partner who integrates the solution to their content management system, so they have the expertise, and a days consultancy from them could give a working installation. This type of company would even host it for me - price dependent on the capacity I need. Beyond the open source download, there are some commercial options with extra features which I can licence, or even buy as a Software as a Service offering for a monthly charge. Depending on the type of application and the business risk, you can argue pros and cons for the SaaS or OSS route, but the writing is on the wall for the traditional software licence option.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, ASP, OSS, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Siebel

Let's Have a Paradigm Shift Away from the Term "Paradigm Shift"

2005-10-31T23:31:00.000Z

I've been trying to avoid using the term Paradigm Shift in a number of articles on this blog. The gravitational pull to the term has been enormous, but I've managed it. I realise I'm not the only one - this item on Media Orchard - Idea Grove's blog, taught me where the term came from, and showed me someone's even more fed up with it than I am!

Technorati Tags : Paradigm

Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace

2005-10-31T22:02:00.000Z

Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (IPB) is the systematic and continuous analysis of the adversary, terrain, and conditions in the assigned or potential battlespace. It is an analytic framework for organizing information to help provide timely, accurate, and relevant intelligence to the military decisionmaking process (MDMP). Right - now substitute marketing for military, and we are talking business rather than army or special forces.

I was thinking about the importance of market intelligence today while I was speaking to one of my prospects. They are a small, well organised, family run accounting practice, that presents a bigger image to the world at large. Their main partner was explaining to me how he looks for new business, using lists of new starter companies in his area, and how he put together his main marketing letter that he sends to those new prospects. These are his target market, but he has a reputation for being choosy about the clients he takes on. What he told me reminded me how important it is for any organisation to get the marketing basics right, but how often we fall in to the trap of drawing on all of our years of experience, and then not bothering to test it with the target audience. He'd written and refined his introductory letter several times, but before he sent it out he decided to review it with two of his existing clients. Both of them said the same thing - that it was pretty good, explained what the practice does, but that it would be destined for the bin in both cases!

He asked them to refine it for him - probably 80% of the text of the letter remained, and the changes were subtle, but very important. The letter offers a free initial meeting, but majors on the message that you should not put off getting professional advice until a later stage of your business (as new start ups so often do). The letter doesn't cover much detail on what the practice does - they're accountants after all, everybody knows what an accountant does! The letter explains that they are a small business too, so they understand the issues the client is facing at first hand. It points out that the partner is a member of the Institute of Business Advisors (more than just an accountant). It explains that they have a fixed fee structure, so the client will always know where they stand on the bill, and that advice and support on the phone is always free. It explains that they understand how busy the client must be so they can meet in the evening or the weekend, and at the client's home if they wish - that endeavours to get away from the waiting room syndrome where a visit to the accountant begins to feel like a visit to the dentist! These are all good ways that this practice differentiates themselves from the herd, and it works, because the prospective clients often refer back to the letter several times in the early conversations.

As in any campaign, military or marketing - it's about good intelligence and executing the basics!

Update: The family practice in question is Holden Associates, and Jason Holden was explaining his story.

Technorati Tags : Marketing, leads, intelligence, preparation, tactics, testing, business

Rebranding and Web Two Point Doh!

2005-10-31T08:03:00.000Z

Earlier in the year I was advising a software house client on rebranding their company. While I was pondering and brainstorming on new names I found a plethora of sites for ideas, like Wordlab or Igor's Snark Hunting, but also some silly ones like Jeremy Keith's which suggests name and mission for your New Media company.

But now with the new phase of the Internet, the speed that new companies are being formed, and the VC interest in the topic, it was inevitable that someone would have some fun with it - take a look at Web Two Point Oh!

Technorati Tags : Marketing, branding, Web2.0

Is it Safe?

2005-10-29T17:27:00.000+01:00

Like a current UK advert for Revels where I wonder how many understand the homage to The Deer Hunter, is it only people of a certain age who will think dentists, Laurence Olivier and Marathon Man? But actually I mean your data. I had one of those scary moments this morning. A worrying looking blue screen, and I suffered an adrenaline rush of the wrong kind - when was the last time I'd hit the Onetouch save button? Oh dear... about 8 days ago. I'm amazed how many professionals, or even organisations are just too blasé with their data. Those of us who come from an earlier time in IT, when disks went wrong on a regular basis, will have a particular device that was the bain of their lives - for me it was the IBM 3370 (which was the first thin film technology disk). These days disks are so reliable, people get away with sloppy personal IT management. My solution to the problem is a Maxtor Onetouch external USB drive . When I leave the PC at the end of the day, I press the button on the front and anything new or changed gets saved - easy, providing you remember to do it!

Thankfully for me, the adrenaline fuelled wait after I'd hit the power off, then on button ended in XP Professional clearing itself up and starting properly. I hit that Onetouch button as soon as the restart finished. Phew! But it reminded me that with the various Software as a Service (SaaS) systems I use, there was no problem. All that backup and recovery for my accounting system, various intranets, content management system and demo systems are someone else's headache, and with a much better disaster recovery solution than most individual organisations can afford - some of them mirror their data to servers on the other side of the world every 24 hours. It's one of the key reasons why company's should be taking SaaS very seriously. Is your system safe?

Technorati Tags : SaaS, technology, disaster, recovery, backup, IBM, disks

Millions of Markets of Dozens

2005-10-29T00:23:00.000+01:00

Rather than dozens of markets of millions. These are words taken from Joe Kraus's Bnoopy blog. I referenced him in a earlier piece - he's the guy behind Excite, and now JotSpot. He posted a very long item on Software's Long tail that you should go and read, but I'm going to try to summarise a few of his points for you here and add a little of my own spin.

The purpose of software in business is to support an organisations processes - selling, ordering, hiring, manufacturing, warehousing, accounting. Some of these processes are similar enough between businesses that they can be addressed with standard software, like ERP. A large number of these processes might have the same name in different companies (e.g. recruitment) but actually happen in completely different ways. Then there are many other processes that will be unique to the particular business.

There are plenty of software products available for the mainstream business application areas, where the market volumes make it economic for them to be developed, marketed, and sold in thousands or millions of standard copies. But there is an enormous volume of processes that are never touched, because they could only be sold in 100s or 10s or 1s - software's long tail.

However these application areas do get addressed by most organisations with 2 standard tools - the spreadsheet and e-mail. The same problems that give us a headache with Excel in the traditional area of accounting occur here too. Have I got the right version of the spreadsheet? Someone else has updated it but forgotten to mail it to me. No integration between the spreadsheet items, and the mails and documents they relate to.

Many of the tools that are emerging in the Web 2.0 world - cost effective intranets, wiki based intranets, and blogs are tools that can do a much better job of addressing these applications than isolated spreadsheets and e-mails. They provide platforms to integrate the data and with version control and history. You should be looking to apply these to your business to take better control of the ad hoc systems that have evolved.

And lastly, this long tail presents business opportunities for software developers and entrepreneurs. Joe wraps it up in these words:

"Whatever business your starting, think about how to serve millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions. Serving the head isn’t a bad strategy. You can build a great business. But, figure out how to serve the tail of your market efficiently and you’ve got a blockbuster."

Technorati Tags : Marketing, markets, entrepreneurs, JotsSpot, software, long, tail, SaaS, Web2.0

Forbes - Attack of the Blogs!

2005-10-28T10:27:00.000+01:00

I am indebted to Dennis Howlett and Owen Barder (a Londoner transplanted to Berkeley, California) for highlighting a Forbes front cover story that attacks we bloggers and the blogosphere, calling us a lynch mob. I can't add to Dennis or Owen's words, so please go and read about it there.

One thing I can say, is that I am completely unimpressed by Forbes.com. You have to register with the site to get at the article, which is free, but you have to wade through pages of tick boxes to subscribe/not subscribe to various newsletters, then you get a big advertising page to skip, and then a congratulations page pointing at the wrong article, at which point I had to go back to Dennis's site, and click the link again to find it. An ideal example of how not to do your site advertising.

But the thing that really upset me was that my country was not on the drop down list in the registration page. Now I know "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" might be a bit long for the drop down, but no UK, or even Great Britain. Thankfully they had remembered England. It's the kind of thing that gives those Yanks a bad name!

Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, marketing, Forbes

Paxman 2.0 and a Flock of geeks

2005-10-28T00:14:00.000+01:00

As I've said before, I'm amazed how many people I meet in the software business who aren't aware of Web 2.0 and don't realise the blog wave is upon us. Only today I was talking to a good, experienced guy who is selling Software as a Service collaboration solutions for a living, but admitted he isn't as up to speed on wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and the way collaboration solutions are evolving as he should be. Maybe that will begin to change. I just heard Web 2.0 mentioned by Jeremy Paxman and Newsnight .

They did an interesting piece, by Paul Mason, on a new product called Flock, but what was more interesting were the topics mentioned within the item, which they coined as "Internet Part II". Flock appears to be a new browser environment, related to Firefox, and intended to integrate browser, blog, and collaboration functions together in one place, rather than separate products you have to access through the browser. One of the experts had a job title of Director of User Experience, and there was a lot of talk around the user interface. I'd heard the name, knew it was an open source project, but now I know a little more, and that it integrates with the del.icio.us bookmark and Flickr photo sharing services.

But the item explained a little about the blogging phenomenon, covered collaboration and the business benefits of the open source software approach, and used the term Web 2.0. Sadly, as well as bringing this important stuff in to the mainstream of news coverage, the guys that develop Flock are the classic, stereotypical geeks, seen brainstorming over beer and coffee with a whole…. crowd of their brethren. It would be enough to confirm in the normal person's mind that this stuff obviously needs a level of technical geekness beyond mere mortals, and so should be avoided. A great shame, but the situation is improved by a good write up on the BBC website.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, SaaS, wiki, blogs, Flock, social, bookmarking, BBC

Fascinating, exciting and frightening - but Blogs mean Business

2005-10-27T21:22:00.000+01:00

This blog is less than a week old, and I've only been investigating the phenomenon (see 80,001 blogs today!) for a few months, but two things are crystal clear - blogging as a marketing tool works, and every company, no matter what size, needs to embrace the blog as a key part of their marketing mix. I'm indebted to Dennis Howlett who, in a number of ways, has been an inspiration. And I'm flattered to see that my company is the example in one of his latest items "ROI - little man v 800lb gorilla". I won't repeat it here, please go and read it there, but it highlights that a company can spend a significant sum on a campaign in a major "publication" and get a pretty good return in conventional terms of "cost per lead". However, a well read blog, like Dennis's, can do a product review because they are interested in the topic, and generate leads at only the cost of some time and effort. A very good return indeed, and the key is that the blog has the right audience of decision makers who regularly come and visit, because there is useful and diverse material there, and interesting comments from the readership.

I'd often heard it quoted that a Saville Row tailor started a blog last Christmas for a tiny sum, and his business has got global PR coverage from it, and grown astronomically. Dennis's piece refers you to a nice broadcast at Marketplace which uses that as one of several case studies. I now know that he was Thomas Mahon, with a blog called English Cut (hey! I just sent a few more visitors his way!). Interestingly, and as I expected, the blog should not be a hard sell, or even necessarily about the product at all. As long as it has appealing content for your target audience, they will come and read, and find out about what you do as a by-product.

The key message is that blogs are cheap, direct and ideal for niche industries. Start ups, small businesses and niche players generally have very modest marketing budgets, so cheap is good. However, it can't be the only lead generation tool. For my company the conventional and the new approach were inextricably linked. I found the company to do the traditional campaign was going to be worthwhile by posting messages on their site. That produced results, which led me to decide to use from for the traditional campaign. The traditional campaign produced results, which was how I made contact with Dennis, and then in turn ended up getting leads from his blog. It's the viral marketing thing. But the trick here is to pick the ingredients properly - use the conventional methods that still work in the current environment and combine that with the fact that blogs means business.

Technorati Tags : Business, marketing, blogs, blogging

Blockbusters are limited and Amazons have long tails

2005-10-26T23:44:00.000+01:00

This new Web 2.0 world is a wonderful place. It means small can be beautiful. It's a boon to the consumer, both in terms of price and availability, and it means that the esoteric or the eccentric can be easy to find. As well as for consumers, it's great for entrepreneurs, because the barriers for entry to a market, or to collect together the capital and tools required to start a new venture have never been lower or cheaper. Let me explain.

The retail trends of the 80s and the 90s meant that finding my favourite jazz record (and then CD) became harder and harder, as my local record store disappeared to be replaced by an Our Price or some such. Big focus on the top 50 albums, less space for my Jazz. I had to start going to the larger HMVs, Virgin Megastores or Tower Records. Often I would head for strange and dusty specialist shops, with very odd people behind the counter, décor from the previous owner, and fixtures made from poorly painted chipboard. I'd find what I wanted, but it wouldn't be cheap. In an initial wave Amazon has changed all of that. In a second wave iTunes is changing it further. At Amazon, the shelves are limitless. All of the old, and strange and esoteric stuff that was hard to find and beyond the economics of the record shop to be able to stock, is under the fingertips of my search engine. The cost to store it in the warehouse is no different to the latest Kylie. Usually it arrives by first class post the next day, and it's price isn't that different from a top 10 CD in the high street. And the other major factor, is how I get recommendations. In the old days, the dodgy guy behind the counter "might" put on an album I'd not heard that I might like. Or the guy next to me might say "that one's good". These days it's much safer. Amazon recommends that people buying this also bought that. I can even listen to snippets (and it usually only takes 30 seconds to decide if you like it or not). And Amazon are doing the same with books. My local Borders might stock 100,000 books. I can find lots of stuff in there, but Amazon stock loads more, with easy access to reviews, and even the first few pages. And the key fact - Amazon makes more than half or their book sales on titles from outside the top 100,000.

Now with iTunes, the revolution goes further. I get access to the large library, I get reviews and recommendations, and I even get to buy the one track I like rather than the whole album. Currently I still get dragged down Blockbuster by my son and daughter for movies and PS2 games. I would guess the store must stock 3,000 titles. I'm being regularly bombarded by mail shots and adverts for the online rental stores that have 25,000 or 32,000 titles in their inventory. For a modest monthly fee I get to rent a certain number, and I keep them for as long as I like. No more forgetting the day it was supposed to go back and forking out for another rental charge. I get this feeling I won't be visiting that Blockbuster store at all soon.

So the technology of Web 2.0 means that big companies like Amazon or eBay can access the long tail of the market and make it profitable. There is a great (though long) article on the topic, and particularly the media side by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine, called The Long Tail.

I looked at a presentation recently by Joe Kraus, founder of search company Excite (if you remember them) and now JotSpot. He said:

"You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day."

They could make money on the 3% of traffic in their top 10 searches for sex, MP3 and Britney Spears, but not on the 97% of searches on everything else. Google figured out a way to make money on that long tail. But it's not just great for Google, who got big, it's great for the small business entrepreneur. This is a special kind of marketplace where small advertisers can reach small markets efficiently.

That access to the long tail at an affordable level is one of the factors that is lowering the barriers for new start ups, and creating the opportunity for small, specialist niche players to thrive. Joe says that to start Excite back in the 90s cost $3,000,000 from idea to launch, but to start JotSpot this year it cost $100,000 (a much easier sum for many people to raise than $3m). There are many factors to explain the difference, but it is better to hear the story from Joe at his Bnoopy blog. (Hey - and I didn't mention clicks or bricks once!)

What's this Web 2.0 stuff anyway?

2005-10-25T23:40:00.000+01:00

I was explaining what this blog is all about to a friend who knows a lot about the software business, but who hadn't come across the Web 2.0 term. So I thought an explanation and some reference points were in order. There are major market forces being generated by this particular family of discontinuous innovations, with new categories of products evolving, some with breakthrough technology. Before I get in to explaining the phenomenon, to get a steer on the best business strategy in this environment, you can do no better than read Geoffrey A. Moore's Inside the Tornado (and Crossing the Chasm), which have examples from an earlier time before the Dot.com shakeout, but with messages that still hold true.

The term itself was first coined at a conference brainstorming session between Tim O'Reilly and MediaLive International, which also spawned the Web 2.0 Conference (second annual, held earlier this month). Consequently, the best explanation I could find was on O'Reilly's website. Some suggest it's just a marketing buzzword (and I know it's regularly misused that way) but it is much more important, and all about viewing the web as an applications platform.

One of the shorthand ways to describe what it's all about comes from this extract from his article:

"In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"?"

Tim's article goes on to explain that the characteristics of Web 2.0 companies include offering scalable services rather than packaged software. Their approach will harness collective intelligence in some way - from blogging to the Open Source Software model. They will use some form of customer self service model, and adopt a very different, "lighter" business model compared to traditional software vendors. It's all very exciting. Read more here.

I did, however, have to look up some of the jargon and buzzwords in the article - folksonomy for example. See the Bullfighter, elsewhere on this site!

From Marketing Warfare to The Origin of Brands

2005-10-24T22:49:00.000+01:00

Even in the Web 2.0 world, the basic laws of marketing still apply. Many years ago I picked up a book called Marketing Warfare, just because the title appealed to me. Consequently I discovered the best books on the marketing topic, written by All Ries and Jack Trout. They include Positioning, Bottom-Up Marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - all great. Al now writes with his daughter Laura, and they run Ries & Ries Consulting together. Although their examples are usually American, and very "big brand" oriented, their messages are universal and can be applied to your business in your sector and geography, or your client's.

The following words are lifted direct from their site, and offer a taster of their last book. You can even download a free summarised 20 page version there - great material, and timeless ideas.

Divide & conquer. Every category tends to expand in many different directions, creating opportunities for narrowly focused brands. The typical American coffee shop that served everything has been upstaged by chains that focus on hamburgers (McDonald's), chicken (KFC), pizza (Pizza Hut), donuts (Dunkin' Donuts), submarine sandwiches (Subway), roast beef (Arby's), ice cream (Baskin-Robbins) and many others.
Exploit divergence. Every category tends to branch off, creating many brand-building opportunities. The soft-drink category branched off to become a cinnamon-flavored drink (DrPepper), an all-natural drink (Snapple) a sports drink (Gatorade), an energy drink (Red Bull) and many others.
Survival of the firstest. The first brand into the mind has an enormous advantage. Amazon, California Closets, Nike, PowerBar, Swatch, Starbucks, WD40 and many others. A small lead early in the game can become an insurmountable lead later on.
Survival of the secondest. If you're not first, you can still be successful by being the opposite of the leader. Listerine, the bad-tasting mouthwash, was the leader so Scope became a No. 2 brand by being the good tasting mouthwash. BMW became the opposite of Mercedes-Benz; Pepsi-Cola, the opposite of Coke; Lowe's, the opposite of Home Depot.
The power of pruning. As a category diverges into two or more different categories, a company needs to decide what operations to prune. Trying to cover every single diverging branch with a single brand name is the biggest mistake a company can make.

Find out more about the book here - The Origin of Brands

Why business people speak like idiots!

2005-10-23T23:57:00.000+01:00

"This is just the kind of synergistic, customer-centric, upsell-driven, out-of-the-box, customizable, strategically tactical, best-of-breed thought leadership that will help our clients track to true north. Let's fly this up the flagpole and see where the pushback is."

"Why business people speak like idiots" is the name of a book by by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky. They know that every day, we get bombarded by an endless stream of filtered, jargon-filled corporate speak, all of which makes it harder to get heard, harder to be authentic, and definitely harder to have fun. You can find out more about them and their book at the Fight the bull website.

Their key message is that this epidemic of bull and boredom presents a real opportunity to us. All those human beings who went to work Monday morning want something better. They don't want disclaimers, non-promises, sugar-coated news or canned speeches. They want someone to capture their imagination, stir their enthusiasm and tell them the truth.

You can also download Fight the bull's rather interesting free software Bullfighter. They describe it as the epoch-defining software that works with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to help you find and eliminate jargon in your documents. It was originally developed by Deloitte Consulting, but is now distributed free through their site. Well worth a visit - plain English and a good sense of humour.

80,001 blogs today!

2005-10-23T17:03:00.000+01:00

Apparently there are 80,000 blogs created on the web every day. Well today it must be 80,001 because Business Two Zero came in to existence earlier this afternoon. If you've just stumbled across this site by accident, been hiding in a cupboard for the last few years, or maybe you just got back from an expedition down the Amazon, and you aren't sure what a blog is, then you should find out more about this phenomenon. They tell me there are 140 million blogs on the web already, and it is affecting the whole world of publishing and media in a big way. That means that you need to know about it, know how it will change some of the traditional ways you've done business in the past, and learn how to use it to your advantage.

One place to start to make sense of what is available, and what might be useful to you, is to look at CNET's Blog 100. If you want to find out about the basics, the history of the way web logging has developed, how it has become a legitimate news source, begun to influence politics, then a good place to start, as with so many topics, is the Wikipedia entry.

The one thing that is assured, is that blogging will grow in importance. At a minimum, companies should monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their products, or make plans to create blogs as a means of communicating with their customer base. Read Forrester's research and thoughts on the topic - Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal?

Inspiration from another nation

2005-10-23T14:03:00.000+01:00

Spain actually. Last Friday I had a long conversation with Dennis Howlett, who lives somewhere north of Benidorm. He writes an excellent blog at www.accmanpro.com and we were swapping ideas about Software as a Service, and the online accounting product that my company has just launched called Twinfield. We talked about a lot of other things too, including wikis, practice management, music, the rise and fall of certain enterprise software companies and the key factors at work changing the nature of the software business. But all of that inspired me to start this blog. So - a big thank you to Dennis - and please take a look at his blog.