In the beginning there was the Web. No one knew it was 1.0, everyone thought it was a one off. Then the late 90s came along and the dotcom crash put people off all things web. Investors stayed away from the web and put their money in other areas. Something had to be done. Something as dramatic as increasing the versioning number, pushing the javascript to new levels of asynchronicity and boasting on your blog about it all.
Now seriously...
There have been some interesting changes in the shiny new Web2.0. We had an explosion of social, community websites. Some of them selling for billions of dollars. Like most of you, I wish I was the entrepreneur behind one of them.
People got all excited about it. They call it a new revolution in the way people interact online. But ultimately, there's nothing revolutionary there. My prediction is there will be out of fashion soon as the novelty will wear off. Same way newsgroups went out of fashion.
Blog of mouth
The blog had a more serious impact however, both for businesses, customers and personal experiences. Suddenly the individual had a voice and a choice. The Content2.0 suddenly became much more personal.
The reason blogs have become so important is that they represent real persons, real experiences. They represent a more personal and intimate way of connecting, be it at a personal level or at a business-to-customer level.
They (in theory) are unbiased and not marketing & PR exercises as the old news and PR releases were.
This is a very important change.
Some companies want to ride the blogosphere, but don't understand these simple rules about blogs and blogging. They still use the old formula with the new tools. They use the old boring company news and PR releases but they deliver them on what they call a blog now. They miss the point entirely.
The point about blogs is openness, real information, direct and honest communication with your customers.
Unfortunately, as many more companies will try to reach customers without changing, I see more and more blogs with hidden agendas springing up. These simply don't work. People trust the information in the blog, and not the concept per se. Simply calling it a blog won’t work.
No doubt blogs will be abused in the same way email was abused, as a channel to get to customers fast.
The sign of great times
Google is a great company, one that caught people's imagination. It has started small and with a very pragmatic approach. Forget all the details, let's do what people want: search. And they did that better than anyone else. It soon became very profitable and for a good reason. It is a flexible company that listens to what customers want.
People point to Google as being the champion of the whole Web2.0 philosophy. It is profitable they point out, not like the dotcom companies of the late 90s. And this is the main argument for a 2.0 versioning of the whole Web. Companies are now profitable and their business models are more pragmatic and profitable.
But if we had a closer look, we would soon realize that Google is not profitable for its cool 2.0 gadgets. It is profitable for the same old thing that it did in the past and it continues to do well: Search. The search engine is their main business, everything else is unprofitable and sustained by the Search.
If we look again at Web2.0 companies and take the social networking websites. Some of them were sold for billions. Are they profitable? Are they profitable2.0? The same old business models apply. If they choose to display ads, they are profitable. Otherwise, they're not. So nothing changed there, still old Web1.0.
AJAX is the king.
AJAX is a nice little trick. I have played with it and liked it. It changes the boring old web user experience into something richer and something that can compete with the desktop experience. That has been a real revelation to many people and suddenly there was a rush for people to develop with AJAX, praise AJAX and see nothing else but AJAX from now on.
As every new technology rush, there are always people that think that one new technology is the universal panacea for all their problems. No surprise people start announcing the death of the desktop, while the web is the new king.
I think it's very premature to start with such ideas. From a pure technological point of view, AJAX is an awful technology. It's slow, it doesn't scale, it's limited. The major benefit is that it works in the limited world of a browser's sandbox. It is cross-platform and cross-browser.
This is what people want. The market leaders have sniffed the trend and they're driving that way. Microsoft is coming up with the new .NET 3.0 framework which will allow developers to create applications that run both on desktop and in the browser, same code (well, with some security limitations of course). While this offers a wonderful view for the future, it is a Microsoft dream and it runs on Microsoft OSes only. Well, we wouldn’t expect anything less from Microsoft, right?
I must admit, Microsoft is onto something here. Unfortunately, they want to keep it to themselves, they want to keep it as a competitive advantage. If they shared it with the world and truly commit to open standards that work cross platform, that would be the real dawn of what you could truly call Web2.0. That would also spell the beginning of the end for Microsoft's current business model. So they won't go there.
Conclusion
While Web2.0 can be the beginning of great things to come for the Web, we shouldn't jump ahead of ourselves and fall into the same mistakes as in Web1.0. Ultimately, profitability, pragmatism and following customers' needs is the same old 1.0 recipe for success. One technology or the other is just the means to get there.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 3:46:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'm a regular reader of Joel on Software forum about Business of Software. It's interesting to see people trying to do what I am trying to do, read about their problems on the way, read about their experiences and ideas. It's a source of inspiration. It keeps me motivated to go on.
Today I was reading the forum and someone asked if there was a product doing exactly what my product is trying to do. I read through the replies, but no one actually pointed out to a software application that does exactly that. It's a motivation to continue. Maybe this product will sell after all.
And this is one major problem that all small business entrepreneurs encountered. Doubt. Will it sell? Is it really a good idea? Or am I trying to kid myself? Ultimately the customers decide. But the road to getting your product to the customers is generally a long one. If the product solves a real problem, then it will sell. There will be people out there buying.
My rule of thumb is asking myself ... Would I buy this product? Generally I'm a very selective. I'm a software engineer and I always think I can do things myself, reinventing the wheel instead of paying for it. That's generally how software engineers think.
Business people on the other hand, they think "How much money will this product save me"? "How much time will it save me?"
If it saves money and time, then there's no reason why a product wouldn't sell. Except if your customers don't know about it. But that's a different story altogether.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 4:07:10 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is where I'll talk about a technology. I'm a technical person, a software engineer. I have worked in many roles. Technology should be as easy to deal with as a walk in a park. Not quite so. Starting a business is not about technology, it's about making technology work, about solving real problems. Technology ceases to be a purpose in itself; it's merely a tool to deliver solutions to real life problems.
It's an entirely different mindset. As a software engineer, you grow to love technology, you get attached to some technologies, you hate others. You might even get caught up in a flame on newsgroups trying to prove your technology is better than other people's.
There's that saying ... when all you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.
And this is true. Software engineers become obsessed with technology and try to choose the technology first and then look at the problem they're trying to solve. Many times companies do the same, just because their people are all trained in a particular technology.
But technology for technology's sake is not a viable proposition. Unfortunately some people found out the hard way during the dotcom crash in the late 90s. When something is cool and sexy, you can easily lose your head and all your money.
In my approach I've decided to take a pragmatic approach. I will choose the technology that helps me solve the particular business need. It hasn't been easy, and, in fact, there's still a battle going on between the software engineer who always favors some technologies and the businessman who doesn't care about technology, all he wants is problem fixed.
In my product, a key requirement was that the application should support as many Windows OS flavors. For the time being I'm not going to support Mac, Linux or other OSes. However, this decision can be revisited later on if it becomes viable to support other OSes.
Another requirement was that the application should require minimal dependencies to be installed. For the time being this disqualifies .NET, although this is the direction Microsoft is paddling at the moment. I like .NET, however I think it needs some time to mature.
There were other choices: VB, Java, Delphi, etc. but since the businessman didn't care that much, the software engineer chose in the end the technologies he was more familiar with: C++, COM, ATL. See, it's never easy to be totally business focused when you come from a software engineering background. However, since the learning curve for other technologies might significantly affect the time to market, the businessman conceded.
But this is a major problem for many companies, the technology vs. the business. The business is always driving the requirements while the technology tries to solve the problems while keeping the pace and avoiding deprecation.
Thursday, November 16, 2006 3:51:11 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
The product I'm going to develop comes out of a necessity for me. It is something that I need and that I would use. This is a good motivation to start working on it. If no one out there would be using it, at least I will. It might sound like sour grapes and it probably is. But the need is nevertheless there.
Filling a need is a great way to start. Many people start a product just because they have a cool idea. Well, unfortunately I had so many cool ideas and, in the end, I always ended up not believing in them. There has to be something pragmatic. Something that fixes a real life problem.
My product at the moment is just in my mind. To my knowledge, there's nothing like this on the market, although there are some products that come close to it. But don't start thinking it's something to do with rocket science. It won't be as revolutionary as the sliced bread either. It's a niche product. And that's why I think I might work. I don't want to conquer the world. I just want to sell some software and make a living. I must say, I wouldn't complain if, as a side effect, I become a millionaire. Ha!
I'm kidding.
In fact, the product I have in mind is quite simple. As I said, it's all in my mind, so I can't talk about it too much. In fact I'll try to keep it in the realm of the abstract as much as I can. And that's simply because I would hate to waste all the effort I'm going to put in developing this application, just to discover that someone else beat me to it by reading my blog.
Hopefully as the product takes shape, I will share more about it.
In the meantime, this blog will be a testimony of my effort and of everything that goes into delivering a product to market, supporting it, making money ... or not. It will also be a testimony to my openness, which is one of the key statements in my business philosophy.
And the first thing I will change is the "we" to "I". Reading back my first entry, I realize how ridiculous it sounds. We are doing that, we are going to blah blah. I must be very honest with you. At the moment there's no "we". It's only an "I".
People use the "we" in the idea that this will create the impression of a bigger company. Customers don't trust one man bands. They want an army of people developing and supporting the product and being there for them.
And it's true, the bigger the company, the more guarantees you have. The less likely it is that the whole thing is a scam. The more likely it is they won't be out of business just after you buy the product.
Committing myself to openness and openly admitting I'm a one man band is a very dangerous strategy.
However, I was reading some statements from some companies that I knew they were one man bands. And this "we" sounds so ridiculous. Knowing there's an "I" behind it, you start wondering if the person behind is trying to mislead you or insult your intelligence.
And many times that's how I take it. In fact, whenever I want to buy a product, I try to find out as much as I can about the company. I tend to trust more companies that share more about them than those that don't.
I hope my future potential customers will think the same way. They will appreciate openness. Openness is actually a commitment to your customers. It's saying ... I have nothing to hide. I believe it to be the right strategy. Time will tell.
Thursday, November 09, 2006 3:25:14 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is the first post in the blog and I am going to talk about what we are trying to do here. TenApes.com is a small software development company located in London, England, United Kingdom.
We do not have a product yet, but we intend to deliver our first version of the product within 2 months. In the meantime, we would like to take the opportunity to write a blog, develop an online presence, talk to potential customers and not ultimately, share the development and progress with everyone. Before we start, here is our mission statement:
Openness
We are going to keep in touch with everyone via our blog, which we don't intend to have just for company news and other PR mumbo-jumbo. It will tool to track the progress of our company and products.
Customer satisfaction
This is something that comes out of a personal frustration with all the services out there. Everything nowadays is less satisfactory when it comes to customer support. You have to hold the line for hours before speaking to customer support. And when you get through to them, they're sorry for not being able to help you with your particular problem, while entirely "sympathetic" to your cause.
Products that work well and do what they say they do
This is vital and goes without saying. However, there are so many products out there claiming to do so many things and in the end, it's all so disappointing to see they're not quite working as they should.
Customer input
The customers will have the input to what direction a particular product will go. For each product will have a section to ask for new features, suggest improvements and raise problems.
Making money
Well, we have to be honest. We have to make money in order to make a living and support/improve products; otherwise it's not really sustainable. While many businesses don't put this in their blog, everyone knows this is the case. However, the intention is to put the customers first and have a product that works. Pricing also helps if it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Our objective is to live and be guided by our mission statement. Please tell us how well we are doing.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006 4:49:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)