a la 360 by Gadi Shamia

Hi All,

My blog (and its owner) are taking few weeks off, to explore the SMB scene  in Vietnam and Cambodia… See you on the other side of my vacation.

Gadi

PS- you can subscribe to this blog RSS feed (or mail subscription) so you are notified when I am back.

I just ended a two-day strategy workshop with a small startup, less than 3 years old and 12 employees strong. The CEO and founder figured out after 3 years of being reactive and flexible that being a real software company requires focus and clear strategy and was smart enough to stop everything and take the time to think about what’s next.  I think that 2-3 years from now the company will remember this workshop as a turning point for the company. Not because of the value of the workshop—all we did was synthesize what they already knew—but because it was the first time they stopped and decided on their own future. Not because a customer asked, not because someone woke up in the morning with an idea—they took the time to go through the process of developing a strategy and creating the big fat arrow in which the company will walk (or better yet, run) in the future. Read more »

The blogosphere and yours truly gave Microsoft a very hard time about Vista. My claim was that I truly don’t care if Vista is easier, nicer or has many new features as long as it is so much slower than Windows XP, its predecessor.

During the last month, Microsoft started releasing its first service pack for Vista: SP1. I downloaded the whole 600MB of it and installed it, and guess what? Windows Vista is working better and faster now. It is still not XP, but the operating system works well enough for me not to complain. I guess that the Vista ordeal cost Microsoft hundreds of millions in lost goodwill. So how come Microsoft was not smart enough to release the right Vista in the first place? I can think of few possible scenarios, read all of them: one can be relevant to the way you release products… Read more »

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: Read more »