-
Philipp's "meta input channel" would be awesome!
-
Interesting discussion. Aaron thinks Marchex doing domain-based rankings a disfavor by unleashing 100K sites.
« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
Andy Schroepfer wrote a long post about the WebSitePros/Web.com merger earlier this week. He points out that the combined entity joins Hostway/Affinity and Endurance/iPowerweb as new members of the $100M+ annual revenue club. The "undervalued and illiquid near-equals" he says, remain "undiscovered for the most part, and still battling for a slice of the massive SME market opportunity, which both firms have always talked about but barely shown the results..."
Will consolidation make WebSitePros/Web.com more appealing to end users? Based on the services that they offer, I'm not optimistic. WebSitePros says its "web designers, copywriters, editors and quality control specialists" will "take the time to get your site right". Sadly, your content will start going stale the minute your brochureware package is delivered. And Web.com's site creation software provides "relevant starter text based on the template you select". With this wonderful time saver, you could launch a website just like 1000s of others!
In short, both WebSitePros and Web.com (not to mention many of their competitors) are still stuck on the increasingly antiquated notion of web presence. Microsoft's Chris Jones, on the other hand, says web services are all about helping customers stay connected. Marc Andreessen, too, thinks over 1 billion people have become Internet users because we want "new ways to connect, new ways to share, new ways to communicate -- new ways to be part of the network, part of the world."
With many millions of MySpace and Facebook users, Marc says social networking has reached escape velocity. With 234K subscribers, WebSitePros/Web.com haven't - and won't. Unless they start thinking beyond hosting static websites to helping customers engage their audiences. BT Tradespace (which is powered by software from my friend Matt Howar'ds company SMBLive!) for one, invites visitors to rate and comment on vendors' products. And TypePad offers a growing catalog of widgets that help site owners collect feedback and build communities.
Of course, Web.com, as Andy mentions, is holding on to the hope that its control panel patent claim will be upheld. The legal proceedings might cause GoDaddy some grief, but it sure won't create market leadership in the "massive SME opportunity".
Rod Boothby makes a very interesting point:
"The personal server is actually not one dedicated machine. Instead it is a collection of services that end users select, run, customize and connect over time. Get a blog at wordpress.com, get a page at Facebook, another at LinkedIn, etc."
Rod thinks companies/teams/individuals will choose among endless varieties of hosted apps for whatever tasks at hand. These apps will be woven together by "new types of web services that take advantage of open APIs and deliver useful tools to support process integration".
He sees personal servers being delivered not by one single vendor, but through a "constantly evolving heterogeneous collection of services with open APIs and tied together by integration services".
Rod's vision makes more sense to me than the prevailing view among hosting providers that SaaS means creating islands on which applications they select run on their networks, are provisioned through their billing systems, and are supported by their staff. After all, no single company can keep track of every potentially useful tool on the market?
Sunir Shah from Freshbooks told me a great story yesterday. Back when the cash register was first invented (in 1879 by James Ritty), it didn't generate significant interest among shopkeepers. NCR founder John Patterson created a market by selling the concept of receipts to consumers.
Sunir, likewise, emphasized that Freshbook allows its 185,000 users to manage invoices, view payment history and track dispute resolution status. Up until now, Freshbooks' primary focus has been the professional services market: consultants, law firms, graphic designers, etc. But with the release of its new API, Sunir says Freshbooks is expanding its target audience to include web hosting providers and SaaS developers.
What I find most intriguing about API 2.0 (complete with documentation, blog and forum - these folks are well prepared!) are its future capabilities. At the moment, consumers are not yet able to manage purchases from multiple vendors through the same interface, but Sunir says this functionality is coming soon. Since FreshBooks is famous for publishing aggregated data with which vendors can benchmark their own' performance against industry peers, consumers may soon start receiving the same quarterly report cards detailing which SaaS apps organizations like theirs are using.
I've always thought one of the greatest value proposition that web hosting providers *don't* deliver is helping customers leverage each other's knowledge and experience. (Yes, everyone has forums. But no, forums aren't enough.) Could Freshbooks help? How will API 2.0 measure up against ModernBill's MBAPI and SWSoft's HSPComplete + OpenFusion? Stay tuned!
