Tag: marketing

The Penny Gap

The truth is, scaling from $5-$50M is not the toughest part of a new venture – it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. I can’t think of a single premium service that has achieved truly viral distribution. Can you?

why paid services are mostly dead, at least in consumer markets

Jeff Bezos vs Bill Gates

I’ve given presentations on “creating passionate users” at both Amazon and Microsoft. 2 big companies, 2 CEOs. Guess which CEO has been to the talk? And he didn’t just sit there, he participated. His hand shot up when I asked a question. He quit fondling his Blackberry. But far more importantly–he asked an amazing question. then he asked, “How can I do more for our reviewers? These people do so much, and work so hard–especially the ones who do a lot of reviews — and the ‘Top Reviewer’ badges are not enough.” I was speechless. Not because I couldn’t think of an answer, but because I couldn’t believe someone this far up the food chain would even think–let alone care about this.

Oracle Vaporware

What is Fusion? Well, Oracle bills it as “The Only Comprehensive, Hot-Pluggable, Unbreakable Middleware.” And it would be, if only it existed.

This is the same product that Oracle was talking up 2 years ago as a way to tie together its disparate acquisitions. 2 years later, it seems that not a single line of code has been written. Greenbaum learned from Oracle that this isn’t cause to worry, because writing the code is the last thing that needs to be done (after mapping out the business processes, etc.). What a relief! I mean, it’s comforting to know that the code will just magically appear overnight after 2 years of talking about it.

oracle hasn’t written a single line of code after hyping for 2 years, but then again, why rock the maintenance boat (where the money is for them) with new products?

Terrible Open Source

It’s not lack of awareness that’s blocking OpenOffice.org (do they really have to call the product “OpenOffice.org”? What’s wrong with just “Open Office”?) and The Gimp (do they really have to call it “The Gimp”? I can’t think of a more un-appealing and self-denigrating name for a piece of software.) What’s blocking these 2 apps is that they are simply not better than the commercial alternatives.