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Why you and Low Fat Lattes are Google's Worst Nightmare

Wed, 14 May 2008 11:55:00 -0500
Today’s keynote speaker at ISPCON was Elliot Noss of Tucows. His keynote addressed how Internet Infrastructure companies can compete with the likes of Google and Go daddy. His answer: more customization and real personalization. He used McDonalds to represent Google and Go daddy, and Starbucks as an example of customization and personalization. In his presentation Rackspace is the Starbucks of the Internet world. In his opinion Rackspace succeeds not because it is the cheapest, but because it provides a much more stable experience than most infrastructure providers. Examples of this include robust mail service with large storage space.

As a frequent conference attendee, I hear this keynote often. In other conferences the keynote has been entitled, alternately, “How to compete with 1and1 and Microsoft,” “Withstanding the entry of the giants,” and so on, and so forth. Depending on the audience, the theme always seems to be “specialization and customization”

I wonder, honestly, how specialized and customized companies can get and still make money. Early on in my practice, one of my clients had the idea of creating different brands for different segments of the hosting market. The CEO called this the “supermarket” strategy: he wanted to own the most shelf space in the hosting market. Consequently the company had over 10 brands, each with a different message, back end, support needs, etc. Needless to say, this level of specialization became uneconomical over the long term, and we ended up folding all the brands into two major brands.

Similarly, another client sought to compete in various segments of the market. So he targeted lawyers, doctors and chambers of commerce. This specialization required an enormous amount of sales time, and very expensive marketing (getting a lawyer’s attention isn’t cheap). This marketing effort worked, but the customer market was so specialized, and the product not scalable to other markets, it was eventually folded into a standard “unlimited bandwidth, storage, 10 GB e-mail” plan, with resulting churn.

What Elliot talked about, that strikes me as true, based on those of my clients who are successful, is that successful Internet businesses are high touch, and that people will pay to have their problems go away. Examples of this, and hosting companies that are taking business from 1 and 1, etc., include those that focus on customer support, implementing complex outsourced solutions like exchange, and hold the hand of overburdened IT departments.

In each of these examples the customization and specialization is applicable across the entire product line, and is not feature based. So instead of creating an e-mail solution that meets the unique needs of lawyers, they have support that teaches the lawyers how to create the e-mail product they need.

I see an analogy in my own business: clients pay me to make problems go away. They’re not interested in the most recent regulatory pronouncement about green marketing from the Federal Trade Commission, they just want to be able to market their new “green” data center. Similarly, the nuanced thread that has run through all these keynotes, whatever their title, has been that customers will pay you to make problems go away. Seems to me that’s a great way to succeed.

This was emailed to me by one of my blog readers. They didn’t say where it came from, but good advice nonetheless.

Enjoy!

The new Terms of Use obligates new and renewing registrants to do three key things: 1) self-certify professional credentials, 2) agree that their .Pro domain will be used only by them and 3) consent to use .Pro domains only in relation to professional services. As part of its commitment to ICANN, RegistryPro will monitor new and renewed domains to ensure that registrants adhere to these regulations.

Refunds are only issued to new tryers of the server. It does not mean new

trials of the service so please do not confuse that. Once you use our

service, either with us or with any of our resellers, we do not offer

money back. Adding to that you were told that the plans on this link are

not reseller plans:

All Domize traffic is secured over SSL, making sure your queries stay private and away from snooping eyes.

Zoho Doubles Customer Count in 5 Months, Racing Google Apps to 1 Million User Mark

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:20:00 -0400

When I first met Raju Vegesna at the Office 2.0 conference last October, Zoho had just passed the 100,000 user mark. Less than 5 months later, Raju says they're closing in on 200,000.

While Nielsen/NetRating (PDF) claims that Google has a 92% share of the web-based productivity apps market, Raju points out that Zoho and ThinkFree together attract as many unique visitors as Google Docs and Spreadsheet. (See Ismael Ghalimi's elaboration on the user count discrepancy.) 432,156 users visited Google Docs last December; that's 3% fewer than in October. Zoho, on the other hand, has undergone rapid growth (as CEO Sridhar Vembu puts it, "we try harder") - and hopes to beat Google to the 1 million user goal.

By the way, when Raju and I were introduced, a colleague of his described him as Zoho's PR strategist. I just found out that in addition to attracting favorable coverage in every possible media outlet, he was also in charge of company's data center infrastructure. (Raju recently managed to offload this responsibility.) He insists it wasn't as much work as it sounds, because Zoho's apps run on a self-healing grid that's attached to a pool of standby servers. If any application server dies, the appropriate code will automatically be deployed on one of the standby machines. The failed hardware can be swapped out whenever someone has time. As for customer data, everything is replicated three times and backed up offsite.

(Zoho's Rackable servers are colo-ed at Savvis and Equinix. They're in the process of migrating from 32 bit to 64 bit machines with dual core Intel Woodcrest processors and 8 to 16 GB of RAM. The new machines arrived last week, but won't be deployed until late March. As Google's recent hard drive study shows, a longer burn-in period can help weed out faulty hardware.)

Zoho's HR processes are similarly efficient. Adventnet, Zoho's parent company, has 600 employees (and counting). Whenever a new Zoho product is conceived, a dedicated team of 2-6 developers is allocated to the project. Having rapid access to talent gives Zoho a tremendous competitive advantage. Forget Google Office; the loooong list of ideas and partnerships that Zoho's in the process of implementing might coalesce into Zoho Life: single sign on access to an ever growing suite of fully integrated web apps that do... everything.

Keep an eye on Zoho; they're setting the standards for delivering a seamless SaaS experience. And sign up for an account if you don't already have one. Lastly, stay tuned. They've got some big announcements on the way.

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Producing such informative sentences on crawl space was not an overnight achievement. Lots of hard work and sweat was also put in it.
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