Did you know that Ford motor company owned iron mines, rubber plantations and limestone quarries? Henry Ford thought that Ford motor co needed to be self-sufficient, producing all raw materials needed to make automobiles. Sanity has prevailed with time and Ford is only making automobiles now. No one can be an expert in everything and there are bound to be experts in each field. As individual component manufacturers have grown efficient, business have focused on their core businesses, relieved themselves of non-core businesses and used efficient vendors/partners. This seems to be the prevailing market trend in web technology markets too, as companies have focused on core competencies (or pursued innovations to capture new markets).
One relatively young company has been bucking this trend and that too in a very successful/profitable manner. Google has been making Maps, Earth, Docs, Spreadsheets, Emails, Groups, Webpage making software, Checkout and may be wireless next. Google is a company, I admire and it has been very good in beating competitors, even in its non-core businesses. How is Google able to break the universal efficiency/expertise trend?
Simple, Google is not selling these products to meet customer expectations. It is also focusing on its core business, which is online-ads. It is only offering these products as a vehicle to sell his product-ads. For ex, he is selling his ads, when you use Google Earth, Checkout and docs.
What does this mean to the consumer? Isn’t free a good thing? Yes and No. If you are a casual user and don’t care for quality software consistently five years from now, you should obviously utilize the “free” Google products. But Google is an ad-product company. It would be hard for it to consistently deliver a high quality product in say, Google Docs while its focus is on its core ad business. Obviously an online editor software co is going to be more customer-focused and on-the-job in making “Docs” than Google. If I were a serious business user or have long term plans for software, I would look twice into the long term usability and roadmap of the free software I use.
Just recently I was talking to a friend about the education of our children.
My favorite saying is, “You get out of it what you put into it!”
If you send your child out the door in the morning and open the door at the end of the day, they won’t get much out of their education.
Should you walk your child in everyday so that EVERYONE in the building knows who you are? Probably not, but knowing what is being taught each week is very helpful. Many schools have early library hours so that you and your children can work together to find books on their reading levels and even take AR (Accelerated Reading) tests. Some teachers enjoy having guest readers come into the classroom.
Many schools have active websites where course material and grades (password protected) can be viewed. Although my children get nervous when I check their grades on Friday evening before answering the weekly question, “Can I have a sleepover??”
I bet you have asked, “What did you learn today?” and have gotten, “Nothing!”
At dinner time talk about what they are learning in school. We ask “tell one good thing about your day. . .” We have learned some interesting things this way. Sure, they might say “lunch time” , but then you can talk about their nutritional selections and who they sat with during the meal. I have found that the children enjoy hearing about our “good thing” during our day too.
On a recent Friday morning, I saw one mother hand her teacher a bag of cookies and smiled as she told her to have a nice day. “Hmmmm,” I thought, not a bad idea. Teachers are human and need to be treated as such. A kind word goes a long way.
Have a nice day! j
We are working on an exciting new feature in FundMate (our online fund collection product offering in YourSchoolMate.com and YourSiteMate.com). We are building an online donation pledging feature in FundMate.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“A pledge drive is an extended period of fundraising activities, generally used by public broadcasting stations to increase contributions. The term “pledge” originates from the promise a contributor makes to send in funding at regular intervals for a certain amount of time. During a pledge drive, regular programming is interrupted by an appeal for pledges by station employees, who ask the audience to make their contributions, usually by phone or the Internet, during this break.”
Although Pledging originated in broadcasting stations, many non-profits are using mail and online pledging as a effective means to collect larger donations, over a longer period of time. When you are a non-profit and are seeking large donations, it is hard for most donors to make a large donation of $500 or $2000. But then he may be willing to make a smaller donation of $100 each for the next five years.
One, this reduces the “intimidation” factor of a large donation and makes it easier for the donor to be involved with the non-profit. This involvement can further lead to a larger role in the non-profit later, as he learns more about the organization (similar to marketing buzz, “permission marketing”).
Two, it empowers the non-profit to plan and forecast fund collection over several years, for a large activity like building a new office.
If you are a non-profit and are not running pledge drives, you may want to check it out. With our new product offering, we plan to support donors making an online pledge in the non-profit’s website. We also help non-profit managers to manage the incoming funds and track the pledge over the duration. Another key feature is out bulk email feature that allows managers to communicate to the donors about upcoming donation or a missed donation.
I recently came across an article about identifying product features that delight customers. As a product designer, I often have to choose between feature A and feature B for YourSiteMate.com and YourSchoolMate.com. I think this is not only relevant to product designers but also to service providers. The article gave me some perspective around product feature prioritization, which I tend to do subconsciously.
Developed by Prof. Kano, the Kano model categorises customer needs into three types of features.
1. Basic Qualities/Features-Customers expect this basic qualities/features in a product and a product is considered under quality when these features are lacking. For example, car buyers consider reliability(cars that don’t breakdown) as a basic feature of a car. Also high levels of customer satisfaction are hard to achieve by excelling in these areas.
2. Linear Qualities/Features-The level of customer satisfaction increases with more or better of the linear quality/feature. For example, the customer satisfaction increase as the miles per gallon(mpg) increases in a new car model. But the customer is typically excited only at high levels of achievements. For example, you might be able to delight your customer only when you offer upwards of 40 mpg.
3. Delighter Features-These features excites the customer even at low levels of achievement. Delighter features tend to be novel and can differentiate a product from its competitors. For example, adding a GPS device as a standard feature in a camry or 4Runner would delight me.Very important, if you are a later entrant into the market.
A feature that is a delighter in camry could be a basic quality in the higher segment Lexus.
Thanks Prof. Kano for putting it in simple words.
I was looking for a symbolic starting point to begin my blog postings. But I later thought that philosophically everyday is a potential beginning for something. So here we go, a posting about a recent issue, I faced.
I would like to talk about an important challenge most entrepreneurs go through in their career.When to go fulltime with your business? You have been working on your idea/venture outside your day-time job. You know (or believe) that, you have a good product/services. Customers have bought and used your product, but not enough for you to put in your papers in office tomorrow. You believe your product/service has a good future. At this point, you have reached the point of max utilization of your outside-office time. If you want to increase the rate of customer signup and servicing anymore, you know you have to put in more time. But you don’t have any more time outside-work, to expand your customer base. Basically, you have reached your maximum potential, in terms of time in a part-time business environment. But the problem lies in the fact that, you are making “x” amount in your current corporate full-time job and you make only 20%-40% of “x” in your business. (This makes sense too since you are putting only 20-50% of your weekly time in business). If you quit your day-time job now, you are going to be ending with less income. Not only that, if your business goes south instead of north, you have broken your corporate career path too. It becomes more harder, when you have a family with kids (like I do).
The solution to this dilemma is going to be unique to each individual. I think, if you are interested in corporate career growth, you should not be quitting your job. Entrepreneurship can go either way. The chances of you turning your business into a corporate, is not assured. So if you like the safe life of a corporate world, I think you should keep your business part-time only.
What about the rest of those (us) who are strongly pulled by the nature-of-work, independence and creativity of an independent venture? I don’t know for others, but I can tell you what I did. I turned the problem 180 degrees to seek the solution. I made my business the fulltime/permanent option, and started doing technology contract jobs as a temporary job to compensate for the drop in income. You can work the better part of the year in your business, mixing it with a few months of contracts until your business takes off. The advantages to this approach are, One- you can make enough in contracting jobs to sustain yourself/family (although you should be ok to making less than “x” totally, in the first year). Two, you are in the middle of latest technology not only in your job as well as in contract. And you learn the best practices from both places and are not in a silo. Obviously a lot depends on the availability of contract and part-time jobs in your industry. I am still testing this approach and I shall post more on the approach, as time goes.
My son, who is almost 12, is more inclined to activities like reading, the Internet, Wii (his newest passion) and less inclined to sports. We do encourage him to swim and run at times and only push it hard when he has been especially LUMPY ON THE COUCH.
On Saturday of last weekend, I mentioned to him that there was a short run race on Sunday afternoon through a local park that might interest him. He didn’t seem too interested and I assumed I wouldn’t hear any more about it. Sunday came around and I had built my own internal To-Do list. Taking my son to Overton Park for a run was not one of them. Working on my start-up and some other “David Centric” tasks were.
So I was a bit surprised just after lunch (not much time to get ready) when he announced “Dad, I think I would like to go to that race today”. Since running IS one of my favorite activities, my spouse gave me the “this is your department” look.
This is one those times as a parent when you have to make trade-offs between things YOU want or need to do and something YOUR CHILD wants or needs to do. That happens all the time of course. But, when it is one of those occasions where your child has made a choice or request that demonstrates progress towards a desired change in behavior, it adds additional importance to the decision. In other words, be very careful about saying “no” to these types of requests. Showing that you can make sacrifices in support of them can really make a difference in continued progress toward a goal. “Sure, let’s go run – we both can use the exercise.”
In the end, I didn’t get as much checked off of MY LIST, but my son and I had a great time running together. We even signed up for a few more of the runs. Now we have to practice a little bit more – which is fine with me, especially if he is the one getting us out the door.
The partners and friends of BullFrog Software share their thoughts and ideas about:
* Technology based start ups and their challenges
* Volunteer-based organizations and their success
* Raising & educating kids in today’s world
These are all topics of special interest to the BullFrog Software team and the inspiration for our products – YourSiteMate and YourSchoolMate. We welcome your comments and ideas!
