Andre’s Blog

O’Reilly Radar: Sometimes it takes someone else to replay what you said…was the recent post by Tim O’reilly.  It was in reference to a very interesting point by Tim “The likes of Google, Amazon, and Ebay take the intelligence of all their users-and put it in the interface.”  These are examples of companies that have used customer feedback and usability as a core part of their business model.

The rest of Tim’s quotes in the post are below, however some I think are very dot.bomb-ish and show make entrepreneurs and business managers quiver…my thoughts in-line.

“As far as the average consumer is concerned, Close Enough seems to be Good Enough”  
-This one makes sense, I like it.  Although it’s about mapping services it has broader implications most developers and technology companies would spend all the money and the time in the world before releasing even an alpha, gettin a product to market that is close enough and getting customer feedback for refinement is likely a better strategy.

“The API is a reflection of the richness of the data”
-Not sure about this one.

“Change the Business Model, Change the Rules”
-I remember reading about changing business models and rules back in the late 90s.  Guess what some rules we need to keep, like at some point revenues must exceed costs, you need paying customers and revenu somewhere in your business, and market share alone won’t make your business work.

“Syndication of Data is the Future”
-OK.  But I don’t see the value in simply syndicating everyone elses data all the time. But there is definitely some strong business cases for data syndication.

“It will Self-Brand if you do it right”
-This makes a lot of sense and is quite different than the first dot.com era when start-ups spend all their time on logo, name and other BS that doesn’t help anybody.  If you build a good product and provide value to your customers then your brand will be worth something, Seth Godin agrees.

“Drive Usage THEN figure out how to monetize it”
-I guess so long as you can afford to wait long enough, but I think you should start thinking about this day one, or way before even.  But many companies and websites built huge amounts of users and still went out of business really fast.

“To push your API, do something NOT business-related”
-This does make some sense, and we’ve been thinking about to do it with our AJAX components.  Word of caution though, this alone is not a business model.

My two bits anyway.  I’m thinking if we’re not already in it, we’re coming up on another big tech boom and crash cycle.  The more web2.0 stuff I read the more I have to believe it.  However, I’m going to try to put my cynicism aside and ride the wave this time.  Like the first boom, we need to take the good with the bad and hope we come out on top.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2005 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.