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The Human Touch: TechMeme Getting Nostalgic

TechMeme recently gave up trying to get a 100% working algorithm, instead Gabe  switched to half-manual (edited) mode. I suppose and along with it came emotions, otherwise how could we explain TechMeme getting nostalgic.  There’s an antique classic in the sponsors’ display:

Memeorandum – The Google for blogs on Microsoft’s Startup Zone.  First I got suspicious – is someone recycling TechMeme’s original name for a new venture?  But no, clicking through takes us to a fresh post just off the press, dated January 10th, 2005.  Don Dodage announces:

Memeorandum is a new blog “news clipper service”. It constantly monitors new blog posts and publishes the title and first 50 words or so to the dynamic news page. The page updates every few minutes with new high quality material. There are currently two news pages. One for technology and another for politics.

Obviously a glitch, I don’s suppose you’ll see it long on TechMeme.  Oh, and Happy Birthday, TechMeme ( the 4th, I suppose, more or less).

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Will Google Enter the Business Applications Market?

Google’s next killer app will be an accounting system, speculates Read/WriteWeb. While I am doubtful, I enthusiastically agree, it could be the next killer app; in fact don’t stop there, why not add CRM, Procurement, Inventory, HR?

The though of Google moving into business process / transactional system is not entirely new: early this year Nick Carr speculated that Google should buy Intuit, soon to be followed by Phil Wainewright and others: Perhaps Google will buy Salesforce.com after all. My take was that it made sense for Google to enter this space, but it did not need to buy an overpriced heavyweight, rather acquire a small company with a good all-in-one product:

Yet unlikely as it sounds the deal would make perfect sense. Google clearly aspires to be a significant player in the enterprise space, and the SMB market is a good stepping stone, in fact more than that, a lucrative market in itself. Bits and pieces in Google’s growing arsenal: Apps for Your Domain, JotSpot, Docs and Sheets …recently there was some speculation that Google might jump into another acquisition (ThinkFree? Zoho?) to be able to offer a more tightly integrated Office. Well, why stop at “Office”, why not go for a complete business solution, offering both the business/transactional system as well as an online office, complemented by a wiki? Such an offering combined with Google’s robust infrastructure could very well be the killer package for the SMB space catapulting Google to the position of dominant small business system provider.

This is probably a good time to disclose that I am an Advisor to a Google competitor, Zoho, yet I am cheering for Google to enter this market. More than a year ago I wrote a highly speculative piece: From Office Suite to Business Suite:

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 at SMB’s.

The difficulty for Zoho and other smaller players will be on the Marketing / Sales side. Many of us, SaaS-pundits believe the major shift SaaS brings about isn’t just in delivery/support, but in the way we can reach the “long tail of the market” cost-efficiently, via the Internet. The web-customer is informed, comes to you site, tries the products then buys – or leaves. There’s no room (or budget) for extended sales cycle, site visits, customer lunches, the typical dog-and-pony show. This pull-model seems to be working for smaller services, like Charlie Wood’s Spanning Sync:

So far the model looks to be working. We have yet to spend our first advertising dollar and yet we’re on track to have 10,000 paying subscribers by Thanksgiving.

It may also work for lightweight Enterprise Software:

It’s about customers wanting easy to use, practical, easy to install (or hosted) software that is far less expensive and that does not entail an arduous, painful purchasing process. It’s should be simple, straightforward and easy to buy.

The company, whose President I’ve just quoted, Atlassian, is the market leader in their space, listing the top Fortune 500 as their customers, yet they still have no sales force whatsoever.

However, when it comes to business process software, we’re just too damn conditioned to expect cajoling, hand-holding… the pull-model does not quite seem to work. Salesforce.com, the “granddaddy” of SaaS has a very traditional enterprise sales army, and even NetSuite, targeting the SMB market came to similar conclusions. Says CEO Zach Nelson:

NetSuite, which also offers free trials, takes, on average, 60 days to close a deal and might run three to five demonstrations of the program before customers are convinced.

European All-in-One SaaS provider 24SevenOffice, which caters for the VSB (Very Small Business) market also sees a hybrid model: automated web-sales for 1-5 employee businesses, but above that they often get involved in some pre-sales consulting, hand-holding. Of course I can quote the opposite: WinWeb’s service is bought, not sold, and so is Zoho CRM. But this model is far from universal.

What happens if Google enters this market? If anyone, they have the clout to create/expand market, change customer behavior. Critics of Google’s Enterprise plans cite their poor support level, and call on them to essentially change their DNA, or fail in the Enterprise market. Well, I say, Google, don’t try to change, take advantage of who you are, and cater for the right market. As consumers we all (?) use Google services – they are great, when they work, **** when they don’t. Service is non-existent – but we’re used to it. Google is a faceless algorithm, not people, and we know that – adjusted our expectations.

Whether it’s Search, Gmail, Docs, Spreadsheets, Wiki, Accounting, CRM, when it comes from Google, we’re conditioned to try-and-buy, without any babysitting. Small businesses don’t subscribe to Gartner, don’t hire Accenture for a feasibility study: their buying decision is very much a consumer-style process. Read a few reviews (ZDNet, not Gartner), test, decide and buy.

The way we’ll all consume software as a service some day.

Update: As an aside, the Read/WriteWeb article that inspired this post demonstrates the “enterprise software sexiness” issue, which was started by Robert Scoble and became a Firestorm, per Nick Carr. I really think it’s a very thoughtful post, which, quite unusually for Read/WriteWeb sat alone at the bottom of TechMeme, then dropped off quickly. Now, has this not been about Accounting (yeah, I know, boring) software by Google, but, say adding colors to Gmail labels, in the next half an hour all the usual suspects would have piled on, and this would have taken up the top half of TechMeme. smile_sarcastic

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Over Thirty You Are a Senior

Multiply, a social network aimed at 30-somethings, has just announced additional venture funding of $16.6 million” – reports Venturebeat.

“Social networking sites take notice of seniors” – says the International Herald Tribune.

Here’s the screenprint from Techmeme.

Now I wonder if I am a senior Thinking

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OpenDNS Shortcuts (are) were More Like Detours

Use OpenDNS (Updated)
Using OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s default supposedly speeds up your surfing experience – it’ s probably true, see ZDNet’s explanation.

However, there’s one feature – a convenience – you should avoid, and ironically it’s called a shortcut. Ironically, because in reality it’s more like a long detour.

For example I have t set up for www.techmeme.com. Here’s my little experience this morning:

Conclusion: OpenDNS may be fast, except when it has to access it’s own server – you’re better off not using shortcuts.

I obviously cleared the browser cache before each step. Stats were measured by the Load Time Analyzer FireFox plugin by Google, and the results are displayed using the Zoho Viewer.

Update: I received several helpful comments, from OpenDNS’s David Ulevitch and Paul Stamatiou who wrote a pretty good review of the shortcut feature earlier. They both pointed me to this system status message, which indicates an earlier server issue this morning, at the time I ran my tests is now resolved.

I have actually experienced slowdowns for days now, which of course was only my subjective feeling, but in the end that’s what prompted me to look for diagnostic tools and run the tests today.

That said, I ran the tests again, under the same conditions, repeatedly, and the results are around 2000ms , with only 3-400ms difference between the ‘shortcut’ and the full URL method. I guess that means OpenDNS is back to normal. Thumbs-up