With a hat tip to Zoli for the tip, news that someone has created a hardware/software solution to creating a VoIP enabled phone out of the iPod touch.
Who needs AT&T (and how p&^%&%ed off are they right now?!)
Archive for December, 2007
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Watching my favourite youtube clip of the month, and some recent conversations I’ve had with regards idea pitching, led me to ask the following simple question;
Is the great idea most important, or the ability to execute?
I’ve always contended that a mediocre idea with the ability to execute well will always beat the “game changer” with no hope of execution.
The calculation changes however when we’re looking at opportunities for well funded and resourced existing businesses (some of whom I’ve been talking with/about/to/at recently). These businesses have the ability to do pretty much anything, so their criteria needs to come down to what idea is the right one to do.
So we see there are two distinct types of business -
- the boot strapped one that needs to get the product to market, can’t wait ad infinitum to create the killer app but needs to execute whatever they’re able to (and of course there needs to be some degree of validity for the concept otherwise they’re wasting their own time)
- the cash happy one who can do whatever and needs some way of evaluating a plethora of opportunities to find the best choices
More and more it will become difficult to ideate the “game changing concept” and I wonder if this won’t, in time, lead to even more a situation of large enterprises acquiring good minds and creating concepts, thus shutting the boot strappers out of the equation.
I certainty hope not and would like to think there are lots of good ideas left to execute that are sufficiently below the radar of big business to allow the small fry to achieve them. The world would be a sadder place without little start-ups.
Sort of…
Office Live Workspace is in beta release now. Unlike Google apps it isn’t a truly online collaboration package, more a service to allow central storage and document sharing between users. It seems they’ve gone down to distinct lines - full functionality offline and cut down functionality (a la Google apps or less) online. So it’s more of a roaming access solution than a collaborative offering per se.
David Berlind reviews the offering in detail and concludes that the cut down functionality is a strategic decision taken by MS to assess the hosted productivity space and react as things develop.
My read is that this is a hedge-your-bets move by MS and quite smart - from here they can either move to a completely hosted suite, or develop parallel offerings on and offline.
Well of course it bleeding well is, which is why I was incredulous to even see that Michael Krigsman suggests that enterprise software doesn’t need to be “sexy” (and the term is misleading and ambiguous) the original post by Robert Scoble really used the word “sexy” when it should have user “user-friendly”, “intuitive” or “solution-centric”.
So with that redefinition in mind I was pleased to read the unreasonablemen’s post this afternoon, using their example of negotiating the nightmare that is SAP. The UM say;
Now SaaS application vendors understand this stuff. Mashup’s, customisable fields, business driven adoption (ie people use SaaS because it works, not because they bought it). If on prem vendors don’t get this, and more usable, nimble and functionally rich SaaS applications come along that make use adoption easier, they are going to be in trouble.
And this is the crux of the matter. My evangelism about SaaS isn’t some modern day cult of worship for the latest, greatest thing. Rather it is an appreciation for a solution that has one core requirement, that is to enable the user to achieve their objectives as quickly, easily and solution-centrically as possible.
So yes, all software be it desktop, on demand, enterprise, consumer or whatever has to have the user at heart. The fact that SaaS does as of design is bringing the whle issue to the fore and making some traditional software companies very worried indeed…