Redmond seems to leak press releases early on a regular basis. Due to be announced at a conference next week is Microsoft Live Search Cash Back, an attempt to gain search traffic buy giving users rebates on items they can buy from Microsoft’s advertising partners.
The user interface is very “find a bargain” circa 1998. It seems strange to try to buy users in this way, the reason people search on Google is becuase it works better (generally) than the other offerings. Rather than spending money trying to buy users, MS should concentrate on improving their search experience.
Microsoft’s release said;
On Wednesday, we will be announcing a major new initiative that our search teams have been driving. We are getting better and better with our core algorithmic search, and at the same time, we are investing to differentiate in vertical experiences and to disrupt the current model. You’ll hear more about our plans Wednesday.
I’ve said before that SaaS providers need to think more about the space between their datacentres and the end user. I summarised this post by saying..
To my mind a good SaaS provider should be interested in this additional real-estate. It represents a space that If MANAGED could be a point of differentiation. A way to get the mass of the adoption curve past their current hurdles and a way to provide businesses (who are putting up mission critical information into the cloud) some sort of SLA (and by association reassurance). It also represents the next evolution of maturity in the SaaS model, SLA’s.
To a SaaS provider, the end user’s service experience is everything. Service uptime being one of the most critical and basic elements of this experience. Unfortunately for SaaS providers, their end users aren’t readily going to discriminate between faults that are within the SaaS providers responsibility or in the Telco’s responsibility when making their decisions about the viability of continuing with the SaaS app. To them, the app will just be down.
I’m not alone in getting stuck into organisations who provide services over the web for their lack of up-time. Allan Leinwand at Gigamo is too, only he’s found some empirical evidence. (This is the actual service uptime, but as evidence it supports my claims that some of these web applications are too flaky to be considered as business applications)
I acknowledge that these aren’t SaaS apps, but the impact can be measured. Look at that Twitter down time, basically one whole working week. Imagine you are the business owner and that’s your business critical app that’s down. Imagine not being able to do business for a whole week, imagine paying staff for that week, imagine dealing with customers….
Until SaaS companies understand these type of impacts and address them, to me you are going to have a lot of difficulty taking SaaS mainstream.
Robert Scoble follows 23000 people on Twitter, this means that he’s getting a new tweet every second or so. A presentation he gave yesterday to the Mediabistro Circus is certainly interesting viewing. He shows his desktop, replete with scrolling RSS feeds, Twhirl notifications and GTalk popups (read lots of detritus that is arguably necessary for a media show-pony but not for anyone who wants to actually get anything done).
Scoble waxes poetic on the world wide talk show, but then interestingly a few things happen;
Scoble admits his use of multiple screens with the “noise” in the periphery
Scoble turns off the “noise” if he needs to work (but I thought all this connectivity was a productivity booster!)
Look at the man! He’s not exactly an advert for the health benefits of being online 24*7
Other than these obvious observations, Scoble demos some interesting offerings all the while showing us why we (he) need to get out and smell the roses more. I’ve offered to take him out for a nice rural run next time he’s in NZ - I’ll keep you posted on whether he takes me up on the offer!
Synopsis - SaaS vendors should really find channel partners to do some of the marketing heavy lifting for them
When Xero first announced its strategy of targeting accountancy firms as a primary marketing channel for its SaaS accounting product I was a little dubious. Bear in mind that SMEs traditionally see accountants as a “once a year” service and, beyond possibly some advice at inception of the business, are unlikely to approach their accountant for operational advice such as which accounting package to use.
Further to this there was no real incentive for accountants to recommend Xero - sure it meant they could (possible) convince their clients that a move to Xero would save accounting time that could then be used for value-added services - but I’m not sure how well clients would respond to this claim.
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