Michael W. Wellman said:
> Based upon events that happened to a now defunct software company that wrote
> Internet software.
>
> We had multiple companies threaten at the last minute to back out of
> six-to-seven digit contracts when "management" read a review that extolled
> the virtues of the news client.
>
> Since "everyone knows" that Usenet is a bunch of worthless fluff and is
> mostly just used for porn *and* management was greatly concerned about
> deploying tools that would allow their employees greater ease in goofing
> off, they decided to cancel the contract and change to a product without a
> news client.
>
> We were able to salvage the deals by deploying a version of the software
> with the news client disabled.
>
> I imagine that attitudes in many of the Fortune 500 sized companies haven't
> changed all that much.
Reality sucks, I guess, since any fool can access newsgroups - which are
just like the Internet, meaning not just a porn thing - with a simple
browser.
A less than smart administrator would also know how to block access to
newsgroups from the system that they have.
> Some people. I missed that.
>
> But somehow I doubt that Excel and PowerPoint are truly "consumer" products.
>
> Perhaps they just didn't want to say "SOHO" (Small Office/Home Office)?
> Which was last years "hot" market sector...
You know very well that Word is the backbone of Office. PowerPoint is nice,
and Excel is quite useful, but Word is the main application in Office, as we
know it. And it's a widely adopted standard, even adopted by people who
don't need as much as Word to get their stuff done.
> Do we really think that consumers who are buying circa $1k computers for
> home are the same group that are buying a circa $1/2k software product?
You would be amazed if we could compile statistics about that :)
> But do you focus your limited development resources on a non-revenue
> producing change that only matters to 2.5% of your users?
>
> Or do you add another checkbox feature that allegedly increases your
> potential customer base by 2.5%, 5%, or even 10%?
That's the short-sighted view. You can always wonder if something will pay
off directly and right after you did it. Or you can do the smart thing and
wonder if it will allow you to keep customers who would otherwise become
irritated with a bunch of little things and dump you. Business isn't just
about new sales. Markets get saturated and you have to think about making
your customers come back. And it's the little things that make them happy
that keep them coming back.
> I haven't looked recently, but I don't think that there is, at the moment, a
> single "real company" producing news client software. But then...there
> aren't too terribly many "real companies" producing mail client software.
It is not because competition doesn't get it that you have to "not get it"
yourself. Companies that get past competition are likely to attract new
customers and keep their present customers loyal.
> Of course, in the end, this is all an exercise in meaninglessness. The only
> opinions about this stuff that really matter are those of the people at
> Microsoft making decisions.
Perhaps not. If a lot of little things irritate present Office users, the
guys who have the power and make the decisions could have problems in the
future. If the opinion of the decision makers were the only ones that
mattered, let me tell you that you wouldn't benefit from a LOT of things,
even beyond technology.
At some point, these people have to LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE, too. The kind of
customers who CHOOSES what he buys won't let others decide what is good for
him. There are a lot of these customers in this world.
Munger
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