I had a lengthy discussion yesterday with a friend who’s a passionate advocate of web-based alternatives to the traditional office productivity suite. We were chatting about the surprised discussion in the blogosphere recently, regarding the relatively small number of US Internet users who have even tried Zoho, Google Docs or any of the many purely web-based suites, and the much tinier number who have migrated altogether. Long story short, he’s one of the tinier number, and I’m ardently not.
Having suffered through the excruciating experience of attempting to manipulate a large, multi-worksheet spreadsheet in Zoho Sheet, I’m not a fan. And in the long pauses afforded by my browser hanging while my dual-core mac with 2GB of RAM struggled with this brave new world I wondered why I was bothering. After all, I have NeoOffice, MS Office and even Apple’s Numbers app sitting quietly in the dock and while each has its quirks they are all exponentially better at dealing with anything other than the most basic data. The reason I was bothering, though, was simple: it’s the collaboration and extensibility that appeal to me, and because I’m a small business owner with precisely zero IT infrastructure or support, the web apps are my best bet.
But I think there’s some confusion driving a portion of the funding and innovation of business applications in the web 2.0 world. Professional bloggers are basically a very specific kind of SOHO user and they’re lucky enough in the main to escape the mind-numbing tedium that accompanies a lot of more mundane office work. I’ve written for a living here and there, and it’s a wonderful existence. I loved jumping from coffee shop to home, and all I had to produce was unformatted (but, let’s hope, good) text; in short Google Docs would have worked perfectly for me. I’d probably have become a passionate advocate, encouraging others to jump on board. Trouble is, the professional bloggers, like most people, assume that the people they’re talking to are essentially like them, and that what works so well for them is applicable in the mainstream.
I wonder if there are clues here re. the extent to which web 2.0 applications have mostly not entered the mainstream office. Guy Kawasaki’s much reviled Truemors is perhaps the most extreme example of creating a startup with minimal investment, but the consensus these days is generally that web companies are cheaper to create than they used to be. That may be true for development, since open source technology and vastly cheaper infrastructure can be leveraged very effectively, but it’s much less true — if it’s true at all — for sales and marketing.
As much as I want to believe I can reach more than a thin layer of early adopters with a zero-cost social media marketing strategy, I’d never invest in a start-up that told me this was their plan. There’s a very accurate and succinct assessment here of why relying on buzz alone won’t work even in the consumer space. In the business space it’s harder still because your audience is, well, working, not surfing the start-up blogs looking for answers to questions no-one is actually asking. Of course, many of those surfing the start-up blogs are business people sitting in offices, but generally they’re taking a break not agonizing over how to improve their productivity. Worse still, many of those suffering what pain there is in existing ways of doing things aren’t the buyer for your service.
37 Signals have become known for their mantra of getting real, and it contains a lot of thinking I admire (and I’m a paying subscriber to both Basecamp and Highrise). But finish reading it and you might come away with the impression that you can do what they’ve done so well: get substantial traction with a non-existent marketing budget. A simple way of taking a reality check here is to ask virtually anyone you know who works outside of the creative or technology industries if they’ve heard of 37 Signals, let alone tried their products. In almost every case you’ll get a blank stare (imagine what will happen if you tell them the origins of the company name) and a resounding ‘no’.
The web applications that have truly entered the mainstream (think Salesforce.com), have done so by intelligently leveraging online and community-based marketing alongside traditional and proven approaches (including inside sales, direct sales, distribution partnerships, resellers, and so on). They’ve created compelling reasons for the customer to switch (simpler deployment, dramatic reductions in up-front and ongoing support and maintenance costs), and certainly done much, much more than simply take something that exists on every desktop and deliver it in the browser. So not only am I not surprised that there hasn’t been a dramatic migration to the browser-based office suite, I think that the smart business-focused web companies are the ones who spend less time preaching to the converted (who, by the way, probably won’t purchase their services) and more time understanding how, where and when their customers will buy.
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