The SMB Market—Quick Reference Guide To Winning

December 10, 2007 Gadi ShamiaGadi Shamia, small and medium businesses, SMB, Strategy1 Comment

Last week I wrote about The SMB Market: the one that is difficult to win, but too large to ignore. My main claim was that SMB spending on IT is about to cross large enterprise spending, but very few companies are successful in winning this market. This phenomenon leads to a very scattered market, led by thousands of different vendors and lacking economies of scale. Take the Business management (AKA ERP): If you add Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, SAP and Netsuite, you will get to about 20% of market coverage. Who has the rest? Others. Who are those others? Many thousands of small to tiny companies that found a way to make a living out of selling a local or micro vertical business management software. Their customers may enjoy personal service and high fit for their needs, but they would not enjoy state of the art technology and the reliability of a large company.

The hardware space looks much different. In just about any survey you read, these two names are coming along strong as SMB market leaders in their spaces. These are two companies with a sound SMB strategy: Dell with its direct and efficient model (cut the middleman is an alltime SMB favorite) and Cisco with the smart separation of its business, keeping the Linksys unit as the SMB and consumer brand and Cisco as the enterprise brand.

Whether your business is a behemoth or an agile startup, if you are selling to the enterprise and now you want to sell to small businesses, you have to start thinking differently. Here are some ideas to get you started: Continue reading “The SMB Market—Quick Reference Guide To Winning” →

Seven Things That SaaS Vendors Need To Do In Order To Increase Their Desirability For SMBs

November 25, 2007March 28, 2008 Gadi ShamiaGadi Shamia, SaaS, SMB, Software as a Service, UILeave a comment

There is no doubt that SaaS and on demand are here to stay: if five years ago on demand solutions looked like an Internet version of the mainframe days (strong central server, no logic in the terminal, bad user interface… sound familiar?), the SaaS applications of today look appealing and offer a good alternative to the on premise world.

Continuing with the “seven things about Saas” Theme, which started with Seven reasons why SaaS is not main street in SMB and continued with Seven reasons why SaaS will be a great success, I would like to turn to the vendors now and offer some do’s and don’ts for the industry… Continue reading “Seven Things That SaaS Vendors Need To Do In Order To Increase Their Desirability For SMBs” →

RaaS—Reading as a Service and the New Amazon Kindle

November 19, 2007November 19, 2007 Gadi ShamiaAmazon, Gadi Shamia, Kindle, Product strategy, reading as a Service, SaaS3 Comments

“There is a new SaaS, Something as a Service every month.” This is how I mused a month ago when writing The next SaaS post. Newsweek has the story about the new Amazon reader, Kindle. The device (that looks anything but kindling) will be sold for $399, and will act like an iPod for your books. Kindle will offer more than iPod in one sense: it carries its “iTunes” with it, allowing owners to purchase and download books whenever a wireless network is in sight.

This is new and innovative in the books world but not really new when we think of what Apple did with iTune and iPod. The big difference is that Amazon created a new entry barrier for the avid book reader—buying the Kindle. Different? Yes. For the last 150 years or so, listening to music meant buying a device to play the music. From CD players, Walkmans or MP3 players: we first bought the device, and then bought the content. The music played on our device. Continue reading “RaaS—Reading as a Service and the New Amazon Kindle” →

The Long Tail—A Short User Guide

November 14, 2007November 15, 2007 Gadi ShamiaBusiness, Gadi Shamia, long tail, market segmentation, segmentation, the long tail2 Comments

The long tail has been here forever. Seth Godin ended his blog post about the topic with the following: “The question isn’t, “Is this real?” The question is: “What are you doing about it?” Since I aim to please, I sat right away trying to help the readers answering this question: What should I do about the long tail? Continue reading “The Long Tail—A Short User Guide” →

Facebook, Market Segmentation And a Discussion Mark Zuckerberg Never Had

November 8, 2007February 10, 2009 Gadi ShamiaFacebook, Gadi Shamia, market segmentation, marketing, Product strategy, segmentation10 Comments

I actually didn’t plan to write about Facebook any more. In my recent post I claimed that Facebook is not solving any real problem. My readers were kind enough to prove me wrong… Jason thought we were just too old, and Jose thought that the problem Facebook is solving is loneliness. This is a big one to solve and a very good point… I scratched my head trying to reconcile the disconnect: Facebook is obviously successful and some people think they cannot live without it (one of the commenters, Radha, tested his strength by not logging into the ‘book for few days—this is how addicting it is). So how come so many people love it and so many others cannot understand the buzz? Continue reading “Facebook, Market Segmentation And a Discussion Mark Zuckerberg Never Had” →

Which Problem Is Facebook Solving?

November 6, 2007February 10, 2009 Gadi ShamiaBusiness, Facebook, Gadi Shamia, Hotmail, LinkedIn, Product strategy, SaaS20 Comments

In a typical Silicon Valley speed, Facebook coverage moved from being all glamorous to more realistic coverage that focuses on the challenges ahead. It looks as if the company has matured in a matter of weeks and now needs to deal with the real world problems and not only with the hype.Seth Godin compared Facebook with good old Hotmail. He foresees similar monetization challenges for Facebook, since they never developed a permission asset and a real relationship with their customers. (It is amazing to see that the question of how to monetize a free service is still open, more than 10 years after Hotmail was launched.)

Alas, I am not going to discuss monetization today. I think Facebook has another big challenge for long-term sustainability (and they have $15B to sustain…): it does not solve any real problem for its customer base. Continue reading “Which Problem Is Facebook Solving?” →

Go Crazy About Your Company Goal

November 4, 2007 Gadi ShamiaGadi Shamia, goal setting, goals, KPI, management, Measure, small and medium businesses, SMB2 Comments

Here is a radical thought: take the one most important parameter you measure in your business and publish it. I don’t mean publish as in a press release. I mean make it available in real time, 24/7 to your customers, employees and competitors. Continue reading “Go Crazy About Your Company Goal” →