1st Wednesday Club
Discussion
PetrolTed said:
Ross, you'd be up against Google Docs amongst others. That's a formidable and established competitor. There's also scribd which might overlap.
Does depend on what he's offering. I use Google Docs (spreadsheets) from time to time and find it adequate and no more. There are some pretty basic functions which are missing (decent date formatting for a start) which let it down. If he went down the thin client / Citrix route then he could be onto something but the start up costs for something like that could be prohibitive.Snoggledog said:
PetrolTed said:
Ross, you'd be up against Google Docs amongst others. That's a formidable and established competitor. There's also scribd which might overlap.
Does depend on what he's offering. I use Google Docs (spreadsheets) from time to time and find it adequate and no more. There are some pretty basic functions which are missing (decent date formatting for a start) which let it down. If he went down the thin client / Citrix route then he could be onto something but the start up costs for something like that could be prohibitive.
Frimley111R said:
Snoggledog said:
PetrolTed said:
Ross, you'd be up against Google Docs amongst others. That's a formidable and established competitor. There's also scribd which might overlap.
Does depend on what he's offering. I use Google Docs (spreadsheets) from time to time and find it adequate and no more. There are some pretty basic functions which are missing (decent date formatting for a start) which let it down. If he went down the thin client / Citrix route then he could be onto something but the start up costs for something like that could be prohibitive.You'll have big problems selling something like that, even to small businesses. There will ALWAYS be someone, if not in the organisation it will be a mate down the pub, who will say ' .. did you know you can get that free with google docs' (or whatever), and he then will not be able to buy it even if he wanted to!
Then there's always the other problem that if you do spend time and money adding value, all the work you do (and pay for) will be included in the next release of google docs anyway ..
I know, I'm a pessimist, I'm also not rich, so feel free to ignore all this ..
Frimley111R said:
I think that simply being proactive could be the key. There are tools to do anything you want on the internet if you can bothered to work out how they operate.
True to a degree but then most small businesses will plum for the default MS option in any case. Frimley111R said:
I'd be more proactive, contacting small businesses, getting them signed up etc. I am pretty sure you could do this irrespective of whether Google did this for free (as they do) but the start up costs could indeed be high (didn't get too far into this but it seemed to be in the multiple thousands).
Apart from startup costs the next 3 major issues are security, bandwidth and uptime. If you can't deliver those you'll be in serious trouble.I gained a reputation at a previous job of finding fault and picking holes in many of my managers plans. One appraisal read along the lines of "Mr. Snoggledog. If you don't like the way I do things the door's thataway >" He was encouraged to leave 6 months later after a few (expensive) flaws were found in his business model.
Wednesdays is fine for me too.
I've been progressing my Marketing idea (probably a good thing as my file sharing/access idea seemed to create more problems than it solved!). I've now spoken to a couple of market research companies and have some specification documents to fill out so that they can provide a quote. I've also been going through the some of the detail of what I want to do and solving this. Things seem to be moving slowly but they aren't really. Everyone I tell about my idea seems positive, and not just people who would be positive because they are my friend or a relative.
I've been progressing my Marketing idea (probably a good thing as my file sharing/access idea seemed to create more problems than it solved!). I've now spoken to a couple of market research companies and have some specification documents to fill out so that they can provide a quote. I've also been going through the some of the detail of what I want to do and solving this. Things seem to be moving slowly but they aren't really. Everyone I tell about my idea seems positive, and not just people who would be positive because they are my friend or a relative.
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