I believe that readers of my blog are familiar with the chart below. It is
the classical “Crossing the chasm” diagram from Geoffrey A. Moore’s
book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to
Mainstream Customers. This book was published back in 1991 and it is still
number two on “Twelve Business Books in One Hour for the Busy CEO” list.
The main argument that Geoffrey Moore makes here is that the “early
adopters” have no ability to influence “early majority” and it leads to
a chasm that is very difficult for startups (or any company with disruptive
technology) to cross:
This book was written in the days when startups typically sold to electrical
engineers (a.k.a. IT) and Brad Burnham described it well in his recent post:
In the old days, electrical engineers focused on getting computers to work
not on getting people to engage with the systems b... (more)
No other major SaaS company in the world could get away with this approach to
paying customers. Not only Google offers no user-friendly tools to add shared
contact to the paid version of Google Apps. They offer no tools. Period.
Here is the only information available to email administrators:
Administrative management of non-employee contacts now available
Premier Edition administrators can now add contacts that aren’t employees
of their own company to the contact list that each user can access in the new
standalone contact manager.
First, create an XML representation of the shared ... (more)
I spoke at the Entrepreneur Country forum at Institute Of Directors in London
earlier today. The event was organized by Ariadne Capital (Disclosure: I am
one of Ariadne investors). Here is the feedback from the audience via Twitter
and below is my keynote:
Tagged: GoodData, lessons, NetBeans, startups, Systinet
... (more)
Business Intelligence projects are famous for low success rates, high costs
and time overruns. The economics of BI are visibly broken, and have been for
years. Yet BI remains the #1 technology priority according to Gartner. We
could paraphrase Lee Iacocca and say: People want economical Business
Intelligence solutions and they will pay ANY price to get it.
Nobody argues with the need for more Business Intelligence; BI is one of the
few remaining IT initiatives that can make companies more competitive. But
only the largest companies can live with the costs or the high failure rates... (more)
BI on Ulitzer
A long time ago I came to the conclusion that “independent industry
analyst” was an oxymoron.
But the willingness to sell independence for cash reached a new low with
TDWI’s New SaaS Business Intelligence Portal.
Please visit the link and see if there is any trace of independence left...
... (more)
Roman Stanek is a technology visionary who has spent the past fifteen years building world-class technology companies. Currently Founder & CEO of Good Data, which provides collaborative analytics on demand, he previously co-founded first NetBeans, now a part of Sun Microsystems and one of the leading Java IDEs, and then and Systinet, now owned by Hewlett-Packard and the leading SOA Governance platform on the market.
Christopher Kenneally
Eddie Budgen
Helen Ching
Tomer Teller
Jason Venner
Steve Capoccia
Hans van de Koppel
Chris Rommel
Andreas Sundquist
Soumya Ranjan Das
