Links - September 7, 2006
Musing about social software in enterprises
JP Rangaswami with a hilarious and very insightful post about the enterprise and its reactions to social software. Here’s one of his definitions:
Stockholmers: Similar to hostages forming an attachment to their captor (despite the invidiousness of their position) there is an enterprise tendency to form deep-rooted and long-lasting relationships with lock-in vendors. This syndrome comes in two flavours: Temporary and Permanent. The Temporary one is less intense, fading when there is a change of management on the enterprise side. The Permanent version is a real feat of engineering, able to withstand multiple changes of management. Nobody gets fired for buying locks. What social software does is threaten to release the hostages from their secure jails
Sure it is only a brochure ware site at the moment, but it has the best marketing pitch I have ever seen for what looks to be a wiki. And that is not to deride these guys. In fact, I mean it as a high complement. If social software tools are going to be adopted broadly within the enterprise, they must be iPod easy. There were plenty of mp3 players before iPod. But none made the idea of a digital music player so easy and so attractive.
Cyn.in’s flash tour gives business users an obvious, appealing and straightforward description of what it does, why it will be a benefit, and what they can deliver.
Is this marketing going to be the key differentiator for enterprise sales? I’m not sure. Enterprise Movable Type can do much of this. iUpload can already do, has done it for 7 years, and has massive customers, including 2 of the Big-4 Audit/Consulting firms, several banks and McDonalds. For a small business, Joyent already has most of the cyn.in functionality, plus calendars, web email, contacts, and activity based work flows.
If Cyn.in’s product matches the quality of their marketing, it could be interesting.
The CIA on Blogging
D. Calvin Andrus has written a really interesting paper called The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community
Technorati Tags: Enterprise+2.0, innovation, wiki
Hi rod,
That is probably the best compliment I have received in a long time. Let me explain: Cynapse (the company making cyn.in) has been in business of delivering technology for longer than 5 years now. During our entire existence we have been labeled as the geeky company that speaks jargon mumbo-jumbo and builds high tech stuff.
We were pretty proud of this image but soon realized it to be our biggest inhibitor to business. 40% of our clients are in India, and selling technology to the Indian Enterprise is very different from the American counterpart. Especially after the dot com collapse, high tech stuff do not intrigue them anymore. Not enough to sign the contract. The only thing they need to see is Instant ROI. Cynapse has been building custom web based collaboration systems based on forums that behave like wikis and look like blogs and sync with PDAs since the last 5 years. We spend a lot of that time explaining to the Human Resource of large enterprises about why they *need* an internal web based forum or an Instant messenger with SMS & H.323 integration.
About 3 years back I decided to turn our stance around from being a bunch of cryptic technology hackers and geeks to an organization that builds simple, easy to understand, usable technology. That’s when we set our headline to be “Cynapse invents technology that applies to and benefits everyday life”. We applied this theory to our next product: SyncNotes (www.syncnotes.com). Our technology pretty much reflected it but our marketing and communication completely lacked one thing: The demonstration of how SyncNotes could be used to solve real life problems. Most people shunned it as just a desktop sticky-note taking widget. Were as we were pitching: ubiquitous information availability using any kind of device. I learned a lot from Apple, who may not be the most successful one in its space, but I don’t think any one can challenge Apple in the ease in which they communicate their technology and its benefits to their customers. Things are pretty much presented based on just what the *user* would like to do. Unlike say in Linux where the interface structure is a reflection of the namespace of the architecture behind it. I remember one change we made to our system was that, even internally, we replaced the usage of the word “user” to “customer” So that even when we design technology, we focus on what the customer wants to see. No we are not a Mac company, in fact we are dominantly Microsoft users along with using every other technology on the planet. I use a lot of Linux too… I like it, because I am a geek. I like the fact that I have absolute control over every single pixel on my screen. My customers however have better things to do. The real customer is just looking for “how can this better the way I do my business”. And he is not going to spend much time with your product to figure this out. Especially in today’s world where there are a million other products to choose from.
cyn.in is the most promising offering we have ever had, because apart from inheriting a rocket science technology base from all our previous work, It has been designed to very simply communicate with its customers. Probably because we did not have the luxury of selling to the enthusiastic American Enterprise, who would relate to us when we said “The RSS Feeds even support enclosures!”
Wow! That’s a long comment! Well maybe that’s because I am flattered by your post :) A year back I took it upon myself to better the way we communicate our products to our customers and potential customers. I guess I just earned the first star!
-Apurva
CEO
Cynapse