post

Customer Service 2.0?

Posted on October 22, 2006 ·

Debbie Landa’s rant of the month:

“Customer Service 2.0 uhm, NOT

Here’s my rant of the month. It seems like everyone is trying to get on the office 2.0 train. Clearly, any developer with some code know-how can make a product but, “servicing” the product is the challenge.

I will openly stand up and say that i’d pay a fee for a product that offers phone support. When a product that you’ve been using breaks, it sucks when you can’t get help. You’re stuck with all your documents or info in random spots and there’s nothing you can do until someone responds.

ok, i’m talking about Google, yes the dearly loved Google that i have praised for acquiring writely, our collaboration tool of choice. Google, meet customer service 2.0….yup, that’s what i’m saying. (You’d make millions if you actually had someone we could call) Why can’t we call you? Why don’t you respond to our silly forms that we spend so much time filling out…why oh why are you making us so crazy. I hate to complain, but it’s been three days and still no reply….. “

I feel the pain … been there, done that.  As a user, I completely agree.  But let’t look at reality, it’ simply not economically feasible to offer phone support to millions of free users.  Support is costly and somebody has to pay for it.

That said, there are companies that excel in supporting their free product, but guess what, their name does not start with G* … not even with Y* … a good example is Z*.   As in Zoho.  I am using several of their products: they all have a “feedback” feature built right in the menu bar.  Typical response time is hours or less; I’ve had 10 minutes, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced more than 2-3 hours.  I seriously doubt you can ask for more with free products.

 

Filed Under: Business, Customer Service ·
post

Angioplasty and Bad Karma

Posted on October 18, 2006 ·

(Updated)
I’ve used the word angioplasty 5 times in this blog.   Not in it’s original meaning, but referring to the term Business Process Angioplasty coined by Vinnie Mirchandani. 

Perhaps it was bad Karma, now we have the real thing in the family. After what appeared to be a routine test, my Dad was found in need of immediate angioplasty.  It did not help, apparently there is too much blockage, so he will have a  Coronary Bypass this Thursday.  I’m with him this week (literally every minute, as interpreter, since he does not speak English) – so I’ll likely be off-blog for a while.

Update (10/29):   Wow, I’m really moved by all the comments and countless email I’ve received from my friends – a big THANK YOU to all.
My Dad is back home, recovering after a successful surgery, and I’ll be back to blogging soon.
Thanks again
Zoli

Filed Under: Misc ·
post

Nick Carr Wants to Fung…

Posted on October 16, 2006 ·

Face it: even “fungus” is a nicer word than “blog.” In fact, if I had the opportunity to rename blogs, I think I would call them fungs. Granted, it’s not exactly a model of mellifluousness either, but at least its auditory connotations tend more toward the sexual than the excretory. “I fung.” “I am a funger.” Such phrases would encounter no obstacle in passing through my lips”
(hat tip: Stowe Boyd)

I wonder when “Fung You” t-shirts will show up in the Rough Type Store. smile_tongue

In the meantime, the rest of us “numbskulls”  should keep on blogging.
 

Filed Under: Blogging, Humor, Misc ·
post

Why I’m NOT Linking to The Blogging Times Anymore

Posted on October 16, 2006 ·

It’s really simple.  The Blogging Times asked bloggers to display their badge and promised a reciprocal link.  Now I’m not a link-hunter, but I kind of liked their writing, and thought why not … so up went the badge,  but they never bothered to link back.

This is unfair.  I’ve taken the link off, but keep the badge, pointing to this post smile_sarcastic

Filed Under: Blogging, Business ·
post

Office 2.0: Additional Awards

Posted on October 16, 2006 ·

OK, unlike the real Awards, these are not “official” and in the lighter category. The “Awards” go to… (drumroll):

  • Kevin Warnock, CEO of gOffice for the most honest statement of all: “I warmly recommend everybody to use our competitors’ products, they are fare better than mine“. Kevin concluded his presentation by saying he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his company, and invited any advice …
    Oh, and how could I forget: for offering the gOffice domain to Google for free.
  • Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho/Advantnet, for coining the most origical term when the presenters experienced lousy connections: “office.slow“
  • Ivaylo Lenkov, CEO of SiteKreator, for giving all participants a free Business Account (now, I wonder if it is the 450 who actually were there, or the 4,600 who voted? If the latter, I understand why the site is down for now …)
  • Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, for hosting the Enterprise Irregulars + a few analysts + his competitors to a private dinner and not using the opportunity to pitch his business
  • Michael McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, for letting the cat out of the bag.
  • [your nomination here] – really. please recommend more “candidates” and I’ll post them here.

Tags: , ,

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , ,
post

Office 2.0 Awards: A Quiz

Posted on October 13, 2006 ·

What do the following have in common?

  • Julia French
  • A yet-to-be-built bridge in Budapest
  • EchoSign

OK, to avoid any unnecessary excitement, here’s the answer: they all got far too many votes.

Socialtext’s Julia French and Stirr’s Joey Wan were the two finalists in ValleyWag’s Ms. Web 2.Ooh! contest when a Julia-fan (or not?) created a script and bombed the poll with 8000 or so votes.  Julia really didn’t need this “support” – hey, I voted fo her smile_wink – and certainly did not need the disqualification as a result of spam by someone else. 

The Hungarian government announced an Internet poll to come up with the most popular name for a bridge to be built in Budapest, over the river Danube.  Little did they know the Internet does not know geographical boundaries: Stephen Colbert publicly called his loyal viewers to vote on him, and he ended up winning with 17 million votes.  Not bad, except for the fact that the entire population of Hungary is 10 million, and Budapest has about 2 million residents.

EchoSign is an interesting company that simplifies the process of getting contracts/documents signed, distributed, archived. ( I wrote about them here).  They received the “Best Of Show” award at the Office 2.0 Conference yesterday. See a partial snapshot of the poll here.

Overwhelming win. A little too overwhelming.  The Office 2.0 Conference was a success, instead of the originally expected 200 participants the organizers managed to squeeze in 350 – but where is the other 4,300 coming from? 

Echosign did not need this, just like Julia did not need it. The Office 2.0 Conference did not need it.  The real participants who voted for their favorites deserve better. 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
post

Office 2.0 Awards

Posted on October 12, 2006 ·

Live from the Office 2.0 Conference, where the winners of the audience votes are just being announced:

Best Ofice 2.0 Suite:  Joyent

Best of Show:  EchoSign

Best Demo:

#1 Vyew ;    #2 Wufoo;  #3 Koral

Congratulations to the winners – and all other presenters!

Update (10/13) Unfortunately there was some trouble with the voting.

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
post

SaaS: The Cat is Out of the Bag

Posted on October 12, 2006 ·

I’m sitting at the Office 2.0 conference watching a barrage of 5-minute product demos. FreshBooks‘s CEO just dropped a bomb at the last 20 seconds in his presentation: being software as as service, they can aggregate customers’ data, categorize it by industry, size ..etc, and once they do that, why not turn it into a product?

Customers can receive generalized metrics as well as benchmark themselves against their peers.

Stop here. Think about it. This is big. It’s not about FreshBooks. It’s *the* hidden business model enabled by SaaS. It is so logical, we all had to know it would be coming – but carefully avoids talking about it. No wonder… SaaS adoption is growing but still at an early stage, and security, trust concerns are huge. The last thing software vendors want is to feed those concerns, i.e get their customers worried about the competition accessing their data.

The benefits are obvious: all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with all systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. SaaS providers will have access to the most authentic data ever, aggregation if which leads to the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking. Yet it raises a number of serious questions: How far can they go? What are the security / confidentiality / privacy implications? Are they reselling data that the customer owns in the first place? If the customer owned the core data, who owns the aggregate?

The business of metrics, benchmarking is potentially huge, but it can’t take off until the industry, along with customers, can answer these questions – and more.

Update (10/16): I’ve just checked who else talks about this Unheralded SaaS benefit, and voila! Two posts from fellow Enterprise Irregulars, ex-Gartner Vinnie Mirchandani and Yankee Group’s Jason Costello.

Update (10/30): Read Dennis on Valuing Data and on Freshbooks.

Filed Under: SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
post

Office 2.0 Announcements: Google, Zoho

Posted on October 11, 2006 ·

With the Office 2.0 Conference underway, we can expect a flurry of announcements, product launches in the next two days – no wonder that two companies, Zoho and Google jumped ahead and “preannounced”.

Zoho is releasing new products at a breakneck speed (see my recent posts From Office Suite to Business Suite and One is More than Six: Zoho Suite Single Sign-on): today’s announcement (well, strictly speaking, tomorrow’s but TechCrunch already reported it) is the availability of ZohoX, the online version of Zoho Virtual Office, a communication / collaboration product. The TechCrunch review is extensive; so instead of writing a “me-too” review, let me ponder about what it means.

I already declared the Zoho Suite complete when they added Show (think PowerPoint) to the previously existing Sheet (can you say Excel?) and Writer (you know this one…). As we will most likely witness at the Office 2.0 Conference starting tomorrow, the number of contenders in the online Office space is mushrooming. Most are one-product wonders though. Of course one can pick the “best-of-breed” (or favorite?) individual applications, deal with different sites, different UI, and different sign-on information, and still not enjoy the seamless flow and real-time data updates that Zoho demonstrated between the spreadsheet, database, document and presentation. But then we haven’t talked about email / communication / virtual desktop yet: with ZohoX, to the best of my knowledge Zoho is the only on to be able to offer a full combo. That’s still not the end of story; Zoho has products in the world of transactional, “enterprise” software: Zoho CRM actually encompasses CRM + ERP functions, essentially covering all business functions except accounting.

All these are free now, and CEO Sridhar Vembu maintains there will always be a free version for individuals. So how will Zoho make money? They will have multiple options: enterprise software guru Vinnie Mirchandani considers the Office Suite a good candidate to be used even by large enterprises, and if they so chose, they will also be able to become a unique provider of full business solutions (Office, Communication, ERP+CRM) to small businesses.

Google’s announcement isn’t really a new product, more the merger / integration of their in-house developed spreadsheet and Writely, a capable online editor acquired in the spring. I was lucky enough (or so I thought) to be invited to a pre-announcement briefing in the company of Mike Arrington, Steve Gilmor, Rafe Needleman and a few other bloggers. This turned out to be a good lesson: if you accept the invitation and play the game, you get to be the last one to write about the news: by the time we sat down, the embargoed release was leaked. The announcement itself is quite underwhelming, the most significant part is the fact that it’s coming from Google: Writely and Google Spreadsheet is now one product, under the fantastic (?) name of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. As (if) Google adds new products, I wonder if the name will evolve to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations, then to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations&Databases.. etc.

About the only improvement is the ability to list, search, sort, tag ..etc all files, be it text or spreadsheet together is certainly nice, but that’s where integration ends at this point. The Googlers mentioned users with up to a thousand documents – there has to be a more intuitive way to list them than a simple alphabetical list – for example grouping by tags (labels in gmail terminology).

I regret losing Writely’s “face” – the new appearance is corporate blue uniform that could have been done by IBM, and as for the name, it would make Microsoft’s naming guys proud ….

All in all, I can’t get excited by this – the recent Google Groups announcement was far more positive, IMHO, although it largely went unnoticed.

Update (9/12): Watch this ScobleVid…

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
post

From Office Suite to Business Suite

Posted on October 9, 2006 ·

Zoho is definitely getting an increasing share of attention.  No wonder – they are releasing product updates at a rate others do press releases.  The introduction of a single sign-on  to six of their Office 2.0 applications generated quite some buzz on a normally silent weekend.  TechCrunch,  ZDNet,  Read/Write Web,  AccMan Pro,  yours truly – the usual suspects, one might say, but when “good-old-fashioned” ex-Gartner Vinnie Mirchandani pays attention, you know something is brewing here.

Richard MacManus claims Zoho Moving Towards A Full Web Office Suite.   Previously both myself and IT|Redux claimed the Zoho Suite complete.  So are we there yet?  Well, MS Office was called a suite long before Word, Excel or Powerpoint could really talk to each other. It was ugly, messy, lossy copy/paste for years – Zoho demonstrated a far better, seamless flow and real-time data updates between a spreadsheet, database, document and presentation at the recent IBDNetwork event, and I’m sure we’re in for some surprise at the the Office 2.0 Conference this week. 

But let’s look a bit further, and we’ll find that Zoho has a few more tricks in their hat.  Near-term we can expect a web-based version of Virtual Office, a communication/collaboration solution (think Outlook), which really makes the Office / Productivity suite full-rounded. 

How about transactional business systems?  Zoho has a CRM solution – big deal, one might say, the market is saturated with CRM solutions.  However, what Zoho has here goes way beyond the scope of traditional CRM: they support Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing – to this ex-ERP guy it appears Zoho has the makings of a CRM+ERP solution, under the disguise of the CRM label.

Think about it.   All they need is the addition Accounting, and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted for SMB’s.

 

(Disclaimer: although I have an advisory relationship with Zoho, the above is purely my own speculation)

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, ERP / CRM, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Software, Technology ·
« Previous Page
Next Page »