My aunt, a realtor, was telling me about the importance of staging. Buyers are much quicker to write checks when they're shown a move-in-ready environment. In contrast, houses that need just a fresh coat of paint never fetch the prices they should. It's amazing how people fork over tens of thousands of extra dollars, for no reason other than their unwillingness to put in a day or two of renovation work.
I wonder what she'd think about my plans for this weekend. I'm going to move all the documents associated with a consulting assignment to Central Desktop. I also want to get a bigger Box.net account so I can back up my iTunes and Outlook folders. And I'm thinking about upgrading to Flickr Pro.
There are probably $2 web hosting plans out there that would offer all the bandwidth and storage space I need. I'm sure they'd even include collaboration and photo gallery tools. Instead, if you count my TypePad blog, I'm choosing to spend 20 times more per month on four different kinds of hosting.
But just as newly-painted houses make soon-to-be owners feel more settled, Central Desktop will make me feel more organized. (Update: it really has.) And as Seth Godin writes in All Marketers are Liars, consumers rarely get excited about actual products. What they're really shopping for is the results they hope to achieve through their new purchases.
My only complaint about my hosting arrangement is that it's scattered. Coincidentally, Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee says the same thing in his latest post:
I currently use email, IM, a calendaring program, a blogging engine, and a bunch of wikis. It’s not possible for me to search or tag across all of them, there’s no good way to interlink their content, and I’ve had to get familiar with several user interfaces and command sets. I think of all of these as tools to help me communicate and collaborate... It would be beneficial to me if at least some of them were rolled into one platform.
I feel like now is a good time for "traditional" web hosting providers to shift gears. When I started selling ads on ISPcheck (now HostingCatalog) in 1997, the industry-standard marketing message was bandwidth + disk space = monthly fee. The world's changed in the past 9 years, and this age-old formula is no longer the only way sell web hosting.
Last night I read in Wired that Salesforce.com is planning to add 2000 on-demand apps to its platform. While its basic service costs less than $12 per user, I'm sure customers will happily shell out much more to feel more in control of recruitment, purchasing, and countless other aspects of their businesses. The question is, why let Salesforce.com be the only one to profit from this trend?
Do it. Upgrade to Flickr pro. It's totally worth it.
Check out my work: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramdac
Posted by: Sports Racer | July 03, 2006 at 01:32 AM